rich who can donate money to the cause. The campaign enacts‘a powerful fantasy
for Western girls in particular to save“other girls”from patriarchal sexual slavery
as“child brides”, for instance, through a mechanics of erasure that ignores the
politics of location of girlhood, leading ultimately to‘securing the status-quo’’
(Switzer 2013 : 13). Through analysis of social media campaigns like the‘Girl
Effect’, we can see how affect is mobilised (powerful feelings are evoked) through
fantasies about girls’ successes, which comes in the wake of feminism and is
therefore postfeminist. As Koffman and Gill ( 2013 : 98) argue, the‘girl-powering’
of development discourses have co-opted specific strains of feminist discourse. In
emphasising the postfeminist idea that‘all the battles have been won’(for privi-
leged women in the Global North) it further underscores the move to individualistic
discourses that disavow structural or systemic accounts of inequality. Furthermore,
capitalist pursuit of profit is described as being wholly compatible with feminist
activism. Global corporations can safely claim that they are seeking to increase their
company’s profit and help girls at the same time.
26.8 Conclusion
In this chapter we have explored the global reach of the postfeministfigures of the
failing boy and successful girl. In the Global North wefind a simplistic story of
losing boys and winning girls, a story which for two decades has manifested as a
masculinity crisis over regarding boys and education in the West (Epstein et al.
1998 ; Ringrose 2013 ). The construction of naturalised, universal binary sex–gender
differences is a key dynamic of postfeminist politics (Gill and Scharff 2011 ), which
we have shown plays out through media debates on educational achievement. One
of the most significant implications of the postfeminist discourse of successful girls
is how it has shifted and reduced understandings of gender and education and
caused a shift away from any feminist understandings of sexism as permeating the
wider fabric of society—resulting in, to a recuperative masculinity politics focused
on raising boys’achievement. We also illustrated the transfer and reconfiguration of
postfeminist ideas about girls, education and‘girl power’into the Global South. We
showed how the‘Girl Effect’media campaign re-formulates girls’presumed edu-
cational attainment and success in the Global North as the a magic bullet for
economic prosperity in the Global South. It is implied that it is possible to solve
‘Third World’debt and poverty by harnessing the economic capital waiting in the
untapped, uneducated girl.
To counteract these reductionist postfeminist panics and promises, we have
discussed the important tools of feminist intersectionality approaches for under-
standing power and difference. These perspectives are imperative in building
‘educational feminisms’able to account for the intricate complexities of in how
economic and material contexts shape gender in relation to class, race, sexuality,
culture and more. Our hope is that these feminisms offer ways forward that resist
being perpetually caught up in the gender binaries (girls versus boys)—and the
396 J. Ringrose and D. Epstein