Investing in Girl Power

An incisive critique of the global educational programs that seek to empower young girlsOver the past several decades, teaching confidence, resilience, and emotional regulation as life skills for adolescent girls has grown into a major transnational industry. Investing in Girl Power presents a study of the various nongovernmental organizations, corporations, and nonprofits that have converged around this transformative enterprise of conditioning the sensorial and affective lives of their participants under the guise of empowerment.Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork conducted across New York City and New Delhi, this book shows how these educational programs are disproportionately geared toward young girls from marginalized backgrounds, effectively cultivating their dispositions, feelings, and emotional regulation tools so the girls develop what Karishma Desai terms "affective human capital." This corporeal, sensorial form of capital functions internally to discipline participants' aspirations toward normative gendered and racial futures that ultimately keep their subjugated positions intact.Drawing on ethnography from iNGO and global development gatherings, curriculum meetings, classes, and time spent with educators, alumni, and current participants, Desai examines how these programs, embedded within a capitalistic infrastructure, redirect the labor of social change into girls' own interiors, even as girls and educators demand alternative ways of being rooted in collective care, pleasure, and feminist rage. An urgent exploration of neoliberal feminist pedagogy, Investing in Girl Power underscores the importance of collective liberation.Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.