Teaching the Third World Girl: Girl Rising as a precarious curriculum of empathy

ABSTRACT

This article examines the recently released Girl Rising film and associated campaign to analyze how the guarantee that girls’ education is panacea for local, national and global solutions is sedimented through affective logics. I view Girl Rising as a curriculum inclusive of the film, accompanying packaged lesson plans for educators, and related discourses and affects. The Girl Rising curriculum is part of a larger discursive development apparatus that anchors particular storylines about the relationship between girlhood, education and development as truth. I attend to textual and visual representations of empowered Third World girlhood in the Girl Rising curriculum. While empathy is often understood as a good feeling, I analyze its precarious dimensions, which are cultivated through curricular encounters between the Western spectator/learner and the Third World Girl. I ask: How is the ideal Third World Girl produced in and as curriculum? What are viewers provoked to feel as they consume her potential, and what knowledges about development do these feelings crystallize? Finally, what implications does this have on the production of Third World girlhood?

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum studies
• educational theory
• international education
• gender issues in education
• girlhood

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Nancy Lesko for inspiring my thinking on the topic, and Brenda Nyandiko Sanya for comments on an earlier draft. I am immensely thankful for the anonymous reviewers and special issue editors for their insightful feedback on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Michel Foucault first refers to the term “regime of truth” in Discipline and Punish where he discusses the formation of a new penal system in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and describes scientific discourses were drawn upon to practice punishment, and contends that a new regime of truth evolves (Foucault, 1977, p. 30). In the Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault holds that “each society has its regime of truth” or ideas of truth that are made to function as truth. By regime of truth, he refers to the types of discourses that are used and function as truth, how true and false are sanctioned, the techniques that are established for truth-finding, and the status of institutions and individuals producing and saying what is truth (Foucault, 2004). Throughout this article, I use the term “regime of truth” to discuss how the assumption that girls’ education is panacea for local, national and global problems has become normalized as truth through social science research, the status of the organizations that have stated this, and how these discourses circulate.

2. Lisa Lowe attends to the colonial relationships that connect Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas calling these the “intimacies of four continents” and bend into new forms. Her genealogy of Western liberalism traces the legacies of colonial divisions of humanity developed through these intimacies addressing how race, geography, nation, caste, religion, gender, sexuality and other social differences are articulated as normative categories for governance under the rubrics of liberty and sovereignty.

3. The term “subaltern” was utilized by postcolonial theorists and is drawn from Antonio Gramsci's Marxist theory to describe populations on the far margins of hegemonic projects including colonialism and nationalism. In her seminal piece Can the Subaltern Speak? Spivak (1988) discusses subaltern women as being jostled, used at once to justify colonial intervention, and by indigenous elite in anti-colonial struggles and in nation building. In such accounts, perspectives of subaltern women are missing.

4. I capitalize the word Self to refer to the Western construction of the autonomous individualized self in relation to the Other. It also references Edward Said's Orientalism which underscores the colonial difference between the Self or Occident, and Other or Oriental.

5. Ringrose (2013) describes post-feminism as a set of “politics and discourses grounded in assumptions that gender equity has now been achieved for girls and women in education, the workplace and the home” (p. 1) in the Western world. A postfeminist sensibility involves “the notion that femininity is a bodily property; the shift from objectification to subjectification; an emphasis upon self surveillance, monitoring and self-discipline; a focus on individualism, choice and empowerment; the dominance of a makeover paradigm; and a resurgence of ideas about natural sexual difference” (Gill, 2007, p. 3).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karishma Desai

Karishma Desai is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research interests lie at the intersections of globalization, girlhood studies, curriculum theory, and teacher education.