Beyond Heroes and Hostility: Greta Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate, and The Transnational Politics of Girl Power

ABSTRACT

This article develops a feminist and democratic theory of girls’ activism framed around the work of Greta Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate, and the global youth climate movement. It draws from recent work in girlhood studies to criticize the discourse of the “girl hero” and challenge the two dominant ways that political theorists engage with girls and politics or political change, through Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone and Hannah Arendt’s “Reflections on Little Rock.” A politics of heroism, I argue, unwittingly invests itself in the hostility the hero must face and overcome and therefore minimizes the political networks that make politics possible. Through my readings of Thunberg and Nakate, I attend to girl activists’ local attachments within family, community, and nation; intergenerational, transnational, and transcontinental relationships; and the effects of colonialism, white supremacy, and misogyny and anti-feminism. Underscoring networks of support and solidarity (rather than hostility that the girl hero must face down), I provide a new way of thinking about girls and politics (and politics, in general) outside of the framework of heroism.

KEYWORDS:

• Greta Thunberg
• Vanessa Nakate
• heroism
• girlhood
• politics

Writing and working in the United States at the intersections of feminist theory, democratic theory, and girlhood studies and thinking about “unashamed citizenship” in the Nordic context, I am drawn to the figure of Greta Thunberg, whose appearance on the global scene of politics has unsettled received norms of political action, both in terms of her identity as a girl and the boldness of her school strike.¹ Having protested outside of Swedish Parliament, launched a worldwide climate movement, and berated global leaders for their failure to act in spite of the clear scientific consensus about the climate emergency, Thunberg’s politics resonates with the unapologetic performances that characterize “unashamed citizenship.” Thunberg acted from a position of relative vulnerability and political invisibility, as a fifteen-year-old girl with autism and no activist experience. By her own (and her parents’) account, she had led an introverted life up until that point, with few friends. And as the power of her protests grew, she developed that “peer group” that “unashamed citizens” experience as essential for the transformation of their own activism and role in a broader landscape of political and social change. Thunberg may have begun as a lone hero, but she has emerged as a political activist with broad influence throughout Europe and the rest of the world.

Fitting the theme of the special issue, I use Thunberg’s climate activism and the response thereto as a point of departure for thinking about girls’ activism as a mode of democratic and feminist politics that complicates popular appeals to “girl power.” It is beyond the scope of this article to develop a full-fledged political theory of girls’ activism as it fits in the broader traditions of democratic and feminist theory, but I do want to lay the groundwork for that project. This requires interrogating democratic theorists’ preference for “heroic” politics, which idealize courage as a chief political virtue. Similarly, I want to complicate feminist investments in idealizing girl and women activists who rise up in the face of misogynist hostility. Looking at Thunberg and the movement of which she is a part, the broad network of youth and girl climate activists that are her friends and peers, I begin to show how these networks both mobilize and constrain these girls’ climate activism. Paying particular attention to the work of Ugandan activist (and Thunberg’s friend) Vanessa Nakate, I attend to girl activists’ local attachments within family, community, and nation; intergenerational, transnational, and transcontinental relationships; and the effects of colonialism, white supremacy, and misogyny and anti-feminism.

To this end, I draw from recent works in girlhood studies that emphasize the ways in which girls’ activism often redounds to a single story rather than embedded in local and global networks (Banet-Weiser, 2018; Taft, 2020). As Sarah Banet-Weiser puts it in her book on feminist empowerment in popular feminism: “the story of an individual [girl persists as] … more legible … than the story of feminist collectivity” (2018, p. 104). Within political theory, the models of girls challenging the state are also embedded in individual stories. Consider Sophocles’ Antigone and the “girl hero,” Elizabeth Eckford, introduced to political theorists by Hannah Arendt’s lamentations about the girl who was forced into politics by inattentive and derelict adults (Arendt, 1959). In my own work on “unashamed citizenship,” I have tried to emphasize the significance of state power and peer networks to move beyond stories of the single girl hero against the state or the mob, but Arendt’s Eckford has also been one of my points of departure (Locke, 2013, 2016) and the trope of Antigone as paradigmatic “girl hero” is part of my scholarly and pedagogical vernacular.

I begin with a review of the academic literature on Greta Thunberg, most of which is outside of political science and political theory. From there, I address more fully the Sophoclean and Arendtian frames of “girl heroes” and follow with recent work in girlhood studies. Thinking about climate politics as a network of girls and young women (rather than lone heroes), I turn to Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate’s memoir about Africa’s place in the climate crisis and its political solutions. I centre Nakate’s work because it has been literally and figuratively erased from public conversations and also because her work and the book she writes illuminates the complex interplay of science, state, race, gender, and nation in the shadow of US and European in ways that Thunberg’s story cannot. Nakate’s book shows how the struggle for climate security and climate justice is much more complicated than heroically and unashamedly performing radical acts of citizenship without fear of the authorities who would shame, silence, or police you. Having emphasized the significance of political networks through Nakate, I turn back to Thunberg and read her with this in mind. Together, Thunberg’s and Nakate’s stories move beyond the story of the “girl hero” against the world and also offer a deeper analysis of the youth climate struggle in the context of European colonialism and white supremacy.

Studying Greta: from girl power to technocratic ecocentrism

Scholarship on Thunberg often builds on the last dozen years of work on “girl power” and women’s empowerment (Banet-Weiser, 2018; Orgad & Gill, 2021; Taft, 2010, 2020) and, as noted above, highlights how she is hyper-individualized as “exceptional” (Taft, 2020), dramatized as an “autistic savant” (Ryalls & Mazzarella, 2021), a Nietzschean Überkind (Verharen, 2021), a vanguard “eco-intellectual” (Rahaman, 2021), or part of a broader youth wave in environmental activism (de Moor et al., 2021). Others have analysed Thunberg’s impact on environmental consciousness (Feldman, 2020; Jandrić et al., 2021; Sabherwal et al., 2021), youth consciousness (Haugseth & Smeplass, 2022), her activism’s significance for education studies (Rahaman, 2021), awareness of autism (Skafle et al., 2021) and even a potential link between autism and environmentalism (Taylor et al., 2021). Within media and communication studies, there are robust analyses of her rhetorical style, salience, and public reception (Bergmann & Ossewaarde, 2020; Duvall, 2022; Elgesem & Brüggemann, 2022; Molder et al., 2022; Murphy, 2021; Olesen, 2022). Chinese scholars have highlighted her impact in China (Huan & Huan, 2022; Lan, 2022; Park et al., 2021; Wang et al., 2022).

Political scientists centre adult behaviour, opinion, and influence and thus have been reluctant participants in the growing fields of childhood and girlhood studies with little to say about Thunberg. An important exception is a new book by Alison Gash and Daniel Tichenor, which mentions Thunberg and surveys the gaps in political science and centres the child as a political actor (2022). By my count, there is one political science article on Thunberg’s politics, which focuses on her technocratic lament that “we want politicians to listen to scientists.” The authors classify Thunberg’s politics as “technocratic ecocentrism” because she presumes science to be settled truth that governments can simply heed (Zulianello & Ceccobelli, 2020, p. 630).

Political Theorists’ girls

Within political theory, two frames might readily be extended to Thunberg’s resistance, both of which dramatize a single young woman’s challenge to the status quo—in one case challenging the law and, in the other, doing what is legally permitted but intolerable to the majority. The first is the political theory of Sophocles’ Antigone, which has been complicated by some feminist theorists (Dietz, 1985; Holland, 1998; Honig, 2013; Kirkpatrick, 2011), but nonetheless operates as a story of a girl against the hostile state, as exemplified in Jean Elshtain’s case for an anti-statist feminism, an essay titled “Antigone’s Daughters” (1998). Following Elshtain, one could interpret Thunberg as a contemporary Antigone protesting against the Swedish government (and then, global arbiters of power), with the death threats from Creon and mixed support from a cast of interlocutors, including latter-day Ismenes, the Chorus and elder seer, and the gods who urge that “nothing matters more” than the climate crisis (Hattenstone, 2021).

One could also read Thunberg as the “girl [who] was asked to be a hero” in the battle to desegregate US public schools, brought into the discourse of political theory through Arendt’s “Reflections on Little Rock” (1959). A photo of an African American girl confronting a vicious mob while she tries to desegregate a white school prompts Arendt’s essay. Therein, she criticizes the adult authority figures who abandoned “the girl,” presumably Elizabeth Eckford (though Arendt never names her), one of the “Little Rock Nine” who walked to school alone and without the others due to miscommunication (see Allen, 2004). Arendt’s article ignores the specifics and focuses on the general problem of youth in politics. She condemns the US school desegregation project for asking children to do the work of grown-ups, particularly the child’s parents and the leaders of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People). For Arendt, politics requires the heroic work of confronting hostility and should be restricted to adults. Many of Thunberg’s critics take on the voice of this Arendtian lament, judging the adults who have allowed or encouraged her to become a climate activist in the first place. The iconic photo of Thunberg outside of Sweden’s Parliament thus directly contradicts the Arendtian insistence that youth be protected from political life.

Some of this work on Antigone and Arendt’s “girl” in political theory emphasizes community, intergenerational, and sororal duty and attachment as motivating the girls’ heroic politics, correcting the dominant reading of them as individual martyrs for their causes who are under siege (Allen, 2004; Goldhill, 2008; Honig, 2013; Kirkpatrick, 2011). In my own work on Arendt’s “Reflections on Little Rock” (Locke, 2013, 2016), like others’ (Allen, 2004; LeSure, 2021; Locke, 2013, 2016), I have also tried to highlight the complex interplay of forces in the school desegregation project, and the circumstances that left “the girl” alone without the rest of the group. But Arendt’s reading of her singularity is nonetheless my point of departure. Thinking with Arendt, Thunberg would be the vulnerable girl “asked to be the hero,” and the celebrations of her youth and also her autism, both of which Arendt would see as political weaknesses and human vulnerabilities, become cause for celebration and the grounds of her heroism (see also Elshtain, 1995). Thunberg’s politics would thus turn on her extraordinary emergence and disruption of a political landscape that is first inattentive and later hostile to her being and concerns (see Thunberg et al., 2020).

Feminist studies and the problem with girl heroes

The limits of individual heroism and the general phenomenon of “girl power” or “empowerment” have been addressed in recent work on girl icons and popular feminism. This work directly engages Thunberg, who has become a superstar. T-shirts, mugs, and tote bags emblazoned with her more famous phrases (“How Dare You”) or “Saint Greta” proliferate as “the T-shirt becomes the politics” (Banet-Weiser, 2018, p. 23). This hypervisibility in turn increases her vulnerability and is part of a cruel dialectic of popular feminism and popular misogyny whereby girls are both isolated and celebrated, praised and berated (Banet-Weiser, 2018). Empirical studies that analyse online comments about Thunberg demonstrate the intense hostility she faces daily, to say nothing of the semi-regular threats to her physical safety (Park et al., 2021; Pinheiro, 2020).² She is “Saint Greta,” presumably because, like Antigone, she is supposed to be unmoved by her enemies’ dangerous tactics. Their viciousness is part of the dialectic of popular feminism and popular misogyny, and are built into Thunberg’s standing as a girl hero (Banet-Weiser, 2018, pp. 83–88).

The dynamic of singularity and hostility is further elaborated in Jessica Taft’s study of how the hyper-individualized girl hero, which includes an extended discussion of Thunberg, carries a particular salience that collective politics lack. Even in complex, intergenerational and transcontinental political struggles like climate activism, the story of the single girl emerges. As Taft puts it, the girl hero “allows the watching public to continue to rely on her and expect her to save us, rather than to think about what we might each do to further her cause.” This in turn figures “the girl activist [as] paradoxically simultaneously inspiring and demobilizing” (Taft, 2020, pp. 12–13). Even if unwittingly, depictions of a girl’s politics as heroic amplifies her hostile circumstances and diminishes her networks of support and solidarity and the bonds that animate them.

Another theme that runs throughout Taft’s study, germane to my concerns, is how hyper-individualized stories of white girl activists both efface the collective work they are doing and privilege white activists at the expense of girls of colour, particularly Black girls. Taft emphasizes the power of Thunberg’s whiteness as underwriting her legibility and the construction of her as paradigmatic girl hero. Taft elaborates, “while some girls of colour, especially Latina and Indigenous girls, have begun to get more attention given the efforts of many advocates raising this [climate] issue, Black girls continue to be largely erased. Much as anti-blackness has marked Black girls as social problems rather than agents of social solutions, it also makes it far more difficult for Black girls to be read through the lenses of heroism, helplessness, or hope [the three archetypes Taft identifies].” Taft continues: “Black girls’ rebelliousness, resistance, and anger are perceived as a threat to the social order and are not so readily digestible because of the logics of white supremacy” (Taft, 2020, p. 8). Both Thunberg’s identity as a white girl and the issue of climate justice, a cause that the majority in Swedish Parliament putatively support, would no doubt be received differently from, for example, a Muslim girl striking about immigration policy. Thunberg has been allowed to persist with her strikes, presumably because they are not seen as a threat to Swedish values or order, but the courageous work of an individual, teen citizen conscientiously petitioning the government to act on the science and do its job.

“A bigger picture”: beyond Greta as Hero

Speaking of the logics of white supremacy, hypervisibility, hostility, and security, I now want to turn to Vanessa Nakate’s climate activism in Uganda. By way of introduction, in January 2020, a group of young climate activists went to the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland to petition 3,000 business leaders to take serious action about climate. At a press conference, five young women posed for the camera. One of these women was Ugandan activist Nakate, who was inspired by Thunberg’s strikes to launch them in Uganda. Thunberg also posed for the photo, as did Luisa Neubauer (Germany), Isabelle Axelsson (Sweden), and Loukina Tille (Switzerland). In an AP photo that went viral, Nakate had been cropped out—a literal and symbolic erasure of the transcontinental organizing she was leading and the replaying of old tropes about climate activism and environmentalism as “white” and European concerns, or the story of white saviorism, as countries like Uganda in the Global South feel the brunt of environmental crises and climate change (Nakate, 2021, pp. 1–7). As Nakate put it, “I was the only one who wasn’t from Europe and the only one who was Black. They hadn’t just cropped me out, I realized. They’d cropped out a whole continent” (1–2). She “then tweeted at the AP … : ‘You didn’t just erase a photo. You erased a continent’” (69). The AP responded with hollow comments about photo composition, but as the outrage grew on social media, the AP released the full photo, including another where Nakate had been in the middle. One AP spokesperson said it had led to “soul searching” and promised to improve their diversity training. But no one apologized to Nakate herself (71, 76). “Being cropped out of the photo changed me,” she writes (78). The erasure prompted Nakate to write A Bigger Picture and has shaped her organizing since then.

I won’t detail all of the contours of Nakate’s strikes or the power of the African climate justice movement of which she is a part other than to say that Nakate’s public protests in Uganda and the social media she posted with #FridaysForFuture gave her a global audience. This audience now includes Thunberg, who shared Nakate’s post from her strike for the Congo Forest in October 2019 (86). Of particular significance for this story in terms of the themes of heroism and hostility and transnational and transcontinental networks of girl activists is how just days before, Nakate had prepared for giving her first significant speech in Uganda by watching videos of Thunberg’s Climate Action Summit speech in New York City (81). Nakate was struck by how direct and straightforward Thunberg was as she both “spoke from the heart” and delivered “science and facts and policy” (82). More invitations followed, taking Nakate to Davos where the infamous cropped photo was taken, and Nakate has continued her work since through programmes like the Vash (short for Vanessa) Green Schools Project, a collaboration with a Swiss climate financier to put solar panels on schools and reduce greenhouse gases and pollution near them, launched in October 2019 (105). Nakate, a university graduate (and 22 at the time), forewent advanced studies in business and committed “to addressing the interlocking facets of the climate crisis, environmental justice, and gender discrimination—and to do without fear of erasure” (79).

Nakate’s book corrects for some of this erasure and offers a short course in the climate emergency facing Uganda and Africa, in general, and frames the challenges and opportunities for climate activists by elaborating how race, gender, nation, capital, and the shadow of US and European colonialism shape the particular threats and the mechanisms for addressing them. While planning for her first strike, which she did with her siblings and cousins without her parents knowing, Nakate knew she could not just stand outside of Parliament like Thunberg. They finessed the first strike as a “raising awareness” campaign (rather than a strike), and were only able to stay there for one day. The Ugandan Parliament, in spite of its democratic claims to the contrary, was not a space for public petitions. Furthermore, the gender norms in Uganda differed from the relatively gender-blind Swedish liberalism that supported Thunberg. Although the global media has focused on Thunberg’s girlhood and made her a quasi-feminist icon, Thunberg’s own account of the struggle does not focus on gender barriers to activism. Nakate’s work, by contrast, has an explicitly feminist lens as she navigates a multiplicity of gender expectations and restrictions. She writes about the interplay of extractive capitalism, white supremacy, sexism, and white saviorism. When speaking of mining, she describes its “[link] to child labour and sexual exploitation of girls and women” (85). Nakate does not invoke the technocratic plea to “listen to the science.” She is doing the science, witnessing it outside of her window, talking to her family members, coordinating with activists in Uganda and throughout the continent, comparing the conditions in, for example, the Amazon with those in the Congo Basin Rainforest System, called the earth’s “second lung” (92), and asking why some Africans know more about existential threats to the Amazon than the threats to Congo Basin on their own continent. Nakate connects preserving the planet to movements for girls’ education and access to family planning as she recognizes the Western eugenicist tendency to support these measures as automatic solutions for African precarity (126).

I devote sustained attention to Nakate’s work for all of the reasons she was prompted to write her book that have to do with erasure, but also because of how well it conveys the local, national, continental, and global circumstances of climate crises and climate activism, all layered with an analysis of race, colonialism, nationalism, and gender. In part because of this complex interplay and her own relative invisibility vis-à-vis Thunberg, connected to Taft’s point about white supremacy and white legibility, Nakate’s story does not have the kind of highly visible dialectic of popular feminism and popular misogyny, empowerment and hostility, that is so clear in Thunberg’s. Using the cropped photo as a point of entry, Nakate retraces the story of her emergence as an activist and how she ended up in Davos and explains the particular climate emergencies that motivated her activism and the strikes she launched with her siblings and cousins. Nakate tacks across more technocratic language of climate change science, political strategy, sociological observation, Eurocentrism, and feminism and gender discrimination as she addresses African invisibility in global climate conversation, the international climate politics particular to Africa, and the circumstances that shape her particular work. Nakate’s book contends with barriers to political organizing that she faces, but the larger story is not empowerment in the face of opposition, but building alliances, doing research, forging connections, and strategizing within and across the boundaries of family, community, nation, and continent because of the complex and often implicit barriers she and others confront. Put differently, the hostility Nakate faces reflects structural forces in Uganda and around the world rather than the personal, targeted harassment directed at Thunberg.

Beyond heroes and hostility: kinship, friendship, and solidarity

By highlighting Nakate, I do not mean to suggest that she is somehow the “better” hero or activist than Thunberg, becoming the new, “woman of colour” antidote to the blind-spots of white girlhood or white feminism. This turn is itself problematic, and has plagued so much of white feminist scholarship by substituting a fetishized category of “women of colour” or “women of colour feminism” against the presumably singular and limited white feminist subject or politics (see Moya, 2013). Rather, I am examining the specifics of Nakate’s African feminist climate politics and the relationships and power dynamics that link her work to activists across the African continent and throughout the world. I want to highlight Nakate’s networks of power—and Thunberg’s, as well—with the hopes of recentering both activists’ stories beyond the individual “girl hero” frame while being attuned the anti-feminist, neo-colonial, and white supremacist conditions that shape climate politics and the young activists’ work.

Nakate grew up in an educated and middle-class family with parents who were concerned about environmental sustainability. Her family had been one of a few with solar panels on their house and owned a battery shop that sold solar batteries, and Nakate had learned about global warming in her school, even if it was often presented as a concern for elsewhere and the future rather than her and now (107, 11). In the summer of 2018, when a rash of floods hit East Africa that destroyed everything from crops and livestock to homes and lives, Nakate was primed to see the bigger context. Uganda faced massive landslides where “fifty-one people died and twelve thousand were displaced” (10). Nakate was struck by images on the television of children wading through muddy water from the slides and the fact that these “droughts, irregular rainfall, and calamitous floods had “significantly impacted agriculture, hydro-electricity production, water resources, human settlements, and infrastructure” [that] would mean ‘persistent poverty and increased food insecurity” (10–11). A conversation with her uncle about rising temperatures in Uganda reinforced the depth of the problems and the need for immediate action (13). At this time, Nakate was about to graduate college and was planning on an M.B.A. or advanced work in marketing. She turned her skills towards climate research and soon came across Thunberg’s school strikes in Sweden and her Fridays For Future (FFF) movement.

In Uganda, Nakate’s main association with strikes were at the neighbouring university where students striking to reduce fees faced tear gas and batons from the police (15). Rights to protest were granted via permits that were not easy to obtain and could not be “too political” (15). She worried about getting arrested, having her phone confiscated and not being able to contact anyone from jail, how she would be bailed out, what her family would do, and so on. Nakate also reflected on the gender norms of middle-class Uganda, how she would strike and what that would mean, where she would go, and how to prepare for the verbal harassment that would surely come (14–15). This was not really a question of “boldness” or “courage” or facing hostility per se, but the degree to which one was able to compromise personal safety to make a point. This was not Greek mythology where Antigone appears eager to die for her beliefs; this was Nakate’s actual life, with a stake in the world and a set of political commitments she wanted to carry through. Moreover, Nakate understood herself as a role model for others who needed to stay alive and in the movement. The particulars of the dangers that Nakate faced made it harder for her to replicate Thunberg’s model. And the irony that as the climate crisis literally rained down on Uganda, she could not engage in a Swedish-style protest, was not lost on her. Even Thunberg would later express how Thunberg’s own distance from the actual, material reality of the climate crisis made it easier for her to protest (Hattenstone, 2021). She was not protesting in particularly dangerous conditions; her protest itself was what put her in danger.

Nakate did not tell her parents about her plans to strike because she knew they would dissuade her, but she was more worried about the judgement of her girl peers who would see this as betraying the gender norms of middle-class Ugandan society and respectability (16–17). Ultimately, the urgency of the cause outweighed her fears of what others would think of her: “It was time for me to leave that place of fear and face the world” (17). Moved by Thunberg and other student strikers she saw on social media, Nakate commits: “If they had the confidence to go out in public and call for climate action,” she told herself, “surely I, a soon-to-be university graduate in a country where the consequences of the climate crisis were right before my eyes, could join them” (17). Moved by her uncle’s perspective on the gravity of the floods, “I decided to emulate Greta,” she explains (28). This point about emulation does not mean Nakate naively thought it would be as simple as that, but Thunberg’s strikes were a touch point for Nakate’s strategizing and developing a sense of her work as connected to others and the world. Nakate pulled her brothers and cousins in, and began to plan.

A continent away, Thunberg is also very much embedded in a rich set of social institutions and family histories and global connections. This is the more political and more feminist story than her courage and heroism in the face of misogyny and targeted hostility. Thunberg goes on strike one Friday because she is angry that her teacher is travelling to New York for a wedding (Part, 2019, p. 9). Thunberg is enraged that the teacher cares so little about educating her students or burning up the planet that she will take off work to fly across an ocean for an extended weekend. She justifies her strike that if the teachers don’t care about school, why should she? (Part, 2019, p. 9). But Thunberg routinely tells another story about the power of her school. When she was eight, she learned about a giant island made of garbage off the coast of Mexico, and it was this fact that triggered her interest in environmentalism (Part, 2019, p. 14). Around the same time, Thunberg learned about climate change. At home and when travelling, her parents also emphasized the importance of conservation. When she was younger, she won an essay writing contest sponsored by a local newspaper on the topic of climate change. Finally, in terms of family and community support for her growth: She is related to Svante Arrhenius. Arrhenius was her great grandmother’s cousin who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1903. He subsequently developed the concept of “the Greenhouse Effect” (Part, 2019, p. 18). When Thunberg was 11, she read his 1908 book, Worlds in the Making. Institutions and networks abound in her climate-conscious world; she is not a lone hero, emerging ex nihilo.

Speaking of institutions and networks, whereas Nakate’s strike tactic is inspired by Thunberg’s, Thunberg’s is inspired by another. Thunberg credits the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglass (MSD) High School in Parkland, Florida, who went on strike after the shooting at their school on Valentine’s Day in February 2018. The MSD students staged a national walkout a month after the mass murder at their school. Thousands of youth participated around the country. The Florida students’ group, “Never Again MSD,” was inspired by #MeToo and the 2018 Women’s March, just a month before their own strike, showing again how the networking has operated across issues and generations. Thunberg launched her strike in August of that same year (Thunberg, 2021, p. 24; Part, 2019, p. 58). The networks are ongoing: Amanda Gorman, who came on the public scene in 2020 as the inaugural National Youth Poet Laureate and performed “The Hill We Climb” at US President Biden’s inauguration, was inspired to become an activist by Malala Yousafzai (Hawgood, 2017). Nakate also writes about how she was moved by Gorman’s performance (141).

As these stories show, Thunberg’s strike has spurred others who were already working on and concerned about the impending climate catastrophe, but Thunberg is not Nakate’s origin story. We might think about Banet-Weiser’s “call and response” dialectic differently than between popular feminism and popular misogyny in this revised, more networked view. Thunberg’s strike was a response to the strike in Parkland, Florida in the US, which was a response to #MeToo and the anti-Trump women’s march. Nakate’s work in Uganda is a reply to Thunberg, and they in turn fuel each other. Yousafzai’s work speaks to and inspires them both. Furthermore, Nakate’s work later moves Thunberg, as she notes in a 2021 interview in The Guardian where she discusses how the risks and stakes are much higher for Nakate than for her. When asked if there is a sense of solidarity between fellow activists, Thunberg answers: “Definitely. We have daily contact. We don’t just campaign together, we are also friends. My best friends are within the climate movement. … Apart from the climate, almost nothing else matters. In your life, fame and your career don’t matter at all when you compare them with friendship” (Hattenstone, 2021). Thunberg’s reflections suggest a vision of collective power that is not idealized as uniform and consensus-driven, but a dynamic movement that grows and fractures, adapts and adjusts. There have been millions of climate strikers around the world. The networks of struggle I have sought to highlight, both global and local, should help us better understand the forces in play shaping the specific political landscape for Thunberg and Nakate and its implications for how we theorize the two girls’ activism and democratic and feminist activism, more broadly.

Toward a theory of political girls

To be sure, there is a degree to which my emphasis on Thunberg and Nakate replays the very thing I want to avoid, which is the story of the single girl hero. My intention is to illuminate the complexity of the youth climate struggle and Thunberg and Nakate’s life stories, but in doing so I risk reifying the individuality in relation to their own context and the particulars of each other’s political work. In addition, it is possible that I have not effectively made the case for moving beyond the well-developed Sophoclean and Arendtian frames, which could still usefully illuminate Thunberg and Nakate’s activism and its conditions and obviate the need for further theorizing. The relationship between the political theory I outline here and “unashamed citizenship” may also be unclear. To conclude, I will address each of these in turn and close by reframing the argument and its broader significance.

Regarding the problem of the individual hero and beginning with Thunberg rather than Nakate or another activist, I felt somewhat beholden to the conventions of political theory that typically begin with a familiar figure or approach and push the analysis to move beyond that. Political theory has a tendency to fixate on individuals, hence the repeated work on particular thinkers both in and outside of the Western canon. But as this project develops, I can also see staking out the project in terms of the transcontinental zig-zagging of girls’ and young women’s activism from #MeToo to climate to gun control, decentring Thunberg and the cast of particular individual characters in favour of movements with girls at the helm. Because this article is just beginning to gesture towards a political theory of girls’ activism and because I was writing from the US for a Nordic journal, I also felt it made sense to begin with Thunberg as a paradigmatic example of girl activism and then move to complicate her story both within Sweden and as it relates to the rest of the world. I also tried to show, without fetishizing Nakate’s work, how her book provided a particularly compelling account of political organizing that has resonance in contexts beyond Uganda and Africa.

As to the question of whether Sophocles and Arendt have given us the best frameworks for theorizing Thunberg, Nakate, and other girl activists, I find these lenses too one-dimensional for capturing all of the interlocking vectors of capital, climate, gender, race, and empire, that I have tried to detail here. Even in the more nuanced readings, Antigone is ultimately a story about a girl against the state, and Thunberg and Nakate both conscript as much as they oppose state power and their politics exceed the boundaries of the individual/state dyad that frame’s Antigone’s struggle. Similarly, the Arendtian lens would position Thunberg and Nakate primarily as heroes of social change and the struggle for equality—for good or ill. Thunberg’s and Nakate’s politics have led to social transformation and reimagined equality, but that also does not fully capture the particularities of their climate politics and relationship to their own work and each other’s.

As for how the argument I make here connects to “unashamed citizenship,” I initially assumed I would just analyse Thunberg and her global peer groups in terms of the lens of “unashamed citizenship” and expected this to be relatively straightforward. As I dug deeper, it became clear that the status of peer groups in “unashamed citizenship” warranted more attention to structures and histories of power such as colonialism, white supremacy, US and European exceptionalism, capitalism, and misogyny, than I provided in previous work. In Democracy and the Death of Shame (Locke, 2016), I attended to structural forces in my theorizing of The Lament that Shame is Dead more effectively than I did with the practices of “unashamed citizenship.” As I hope the preceding analysis shows, these forces are equally present in the democratic citizen’s work of social disturbance and there is still much more to be said about structure and power as it pertains to “unashamed citizenship.” Second, in this particular article, I wanted to develop an account of activism from marginalized positions that was less focused on the experience of shame. Read together, Thunberg and Nakate and the youth and girl climate movement push us to think about radical and unapologetic politics motivated by commitments other than undoing shame and humiliation. Finally, the networked politics I have outlined here reflect my desire to think beyond “unashamed citizenship” while acknowledging how it shapes my entry in the conversation. My argument here is not intended to replace “unashamed citizenship,” which I still find to be useful in theorizing activism that disrupts the social order in the name of democratic equality.

Political science and political theory will likely continue to lag in our attention to child and youth politics and contributions to childhood and girlhood studies. As a discipline and subfield, we have not been early adopters of feminist and race and ethnic studies, in part because the formal definition of “the political” has a strong attachment to the established social orders that underwrite politics and government. It is easy to write off interdisciplinary concerns as “personal” or “sociological” rather than properly political. But, as the work in these fields shows, youth and girls, in particular, have not just arrived onto the scene of politics. They have been organizing and agitating where political scientists refuse to look and also out in the open, hiding in plain sight. My hope is that the field can, yet again, lessen the boundaries of who counts as a political actor and whose work is shaping the political landscape and conditions that we study and analyse. Undoing the age restrictions that frame our conception of politics and political action provides, to invoke Nakate’s book, “A Bigger Picture” and a richer field of study.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Elisabeth Oxfeldt, the members of the Unashamed Citizenship group at the University of Oslo, and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on this article. I am grateful to be a part of this project and have my work included here.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Jill Locke

Jill Locke is professor of political science and affiliated faculty in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota (USA). She is the author of several articles in feminist and democratic theory and the book Democracy and the Death of Shame: Political Equality and Social Disturbance (Cambridge, 2016). She is currently working on a book about the politics of girl heroes.

Notes

1. I use “figure” in line with Jessica K. Taft’s invocation of Claudia Castañeda’s terms of “figure and figuration,” as “an entity’s ‘appearances in discourses as well as across them’” (Castañeda 2002 in Taft, 2020). Taft deploys this understanding of “figure” in her study of the trinity of “girl heroes” in contemporary discourse: Malala Yousafzai, X. Gonzalez, and Thunberg herself (Taft, 2020).

2. “Last year, 212 environmental activists around the world were killed. It’s the worst year on record since the charity Global Witness started tracking deaths in 2012. Women and indigenous activists are particularly under threat. BBC Minute’s Olivia Le Poidevin speaks to environmental activists from the Philippines and Colombia who say they have received death and rape threats.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-54165868