Post-Feminist Spectatorship and the Girl Effect: “Go ahead, really imagine her”

Calkin, S.

Abstract

Women and girls are currently positioned as highly visible subjects of global governance and development, from the agendas of the United Nations and the World Bank to the corporate social responsibility campaigns of Nike, Goldman Sachs and Coca Cola. This paper examines the representations of empowerment in visual (image and video) material from the Nike Foundation’s ‘Girl Effect’ campaign. Drawing on the works of Angela McRobbie and Lilie Chouliaraki, I suggest that this campaign is reflective of a mode of ‘post-feminist spectatorship’ that is now common to corporatised development discourses; it is manifested both in terms of the conservative mode of neoliberal empowerment proposed for distant others and the mode of ironic spectatorship imagined for the viewer. I conclude that the relations constructed in the ‘Girl Effect’ campaign between the (empowered) Western spectator and the (yet-to-be-empowered) Third World Girl work to erode bonds of solidarity and entrench structural inequalities by positioning economically empowered girls as the key to global poverty eradication.

Citation

Calkin, S. (2015). Post-Feminist Spectatorship and the Girl Effect: “Go ahead, really imagine her”. Third World Quarterly, 36(4), 654-669. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1022525

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 20, 2015
• Online Publication Date: May 18, 2015
• Publication Date: Apr 1, 2015
• Deposit Date: May 23, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 1, 2016
• Journal: Third World Quarterly
• Print ISSN: 0143-6597
• Electronic ISSN: 1360-2241
• Publisher: Taylor and Francis Group
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 36
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 654-669
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1022525
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1404217