power through educational‘success’. Black feminists, for instance, have repeatedly
illustrated the conceptual problems with gender analysis organised as a binary
between an essential man/woman body that does not account for how gender is
performed and experienced differently for different groups of women/men—so how
is‘success’to be negotiated by black, female bodies (Mirza 1992 ). Such writers
have consistently argued that different life and cultural experiences produce par-
ticular forms of masculinity or femininity, which people take up differently, and that
such gender discourses are always differentiated by other‘intersecting’or‘articu-
lating’axes of experience and identity/identification, such as race and intersectional
analyses, derived from black feminism (e.g., Crenshaw 1991 ; Lykke 2010 ), insist
that we engage with multiple social discourses, including those that are productive
of social class/economic, race- and ethnic-based inequalities, so that we can
understand how femininity is always racialised as white or black, or through ethnic
and cultural categories. Feminisms must also be cognizant of the enormous eco-
nomic disparities between the Global North and Global South, questioning any easy
resolutions to the historical, social and political problems of‘development’and
gender inequalities through education.
26.7 Questioning Postfeminist Promise in the Global
South
In thisfinal, brief section we aim to show how ideas about girls’success and girl
power have spread out and been rearticulated in complex ways in non-Western
contexts. We discuss how corporations and NGOs in the Global South are using
postfeminist parables about the promise of girls’education as the route to economic
and demographic salvation for the Global South (McRobbie 2008 ).
In the context of questions of gender and development, there has long been a
trope in which educating women and girls has been regarded as a kind of‘silver
bullet’, which that could achieve a whole range of objectives, from preventing
population growth (education as contraception), through the making of peace
(women as doves) and to economic growth (women as workforce). What is shared
by all these discourses is that educating girls and women is seen only in instru-
mental ways. In the 1990s the discourse of education as contraception for women
was vigorously contested by a number of researchers in the area of gender,
development and education (Unterhalter 2008 ). The contemporary version of this
instrumentalist view of girls’education can be found amongst those NGOs and
corporations that are using Western‘girl power’discourses to suggest that the
liberation of girls is the human capital pathway to resolve national debt andfind
economic salvation (Koffman and Gill 2013 ; Switzer 2013 ).
One example of this we explore here is a global initiative, entitled‘The Girl
Effect’, promoted by a coalition of organisations, including Nike, the UN and the
World Bank. This social media campaign is one of hopeful simplicities in which
girls are positioned as an‘untapped resource’which can effect global change.
394 J. Ringrose and D. Epstein