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(Re)Thinking the Girl Effect: A Critical Analysis of Girls' Political Subjectivity and Agency at the United Nations 54th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW 54)

Bent, Emily
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Abstract
This study is a feminist poststructuralist analysis of the Girl Effect informed by girls experiences at the 54th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW 54). Based on a series of in-depth qualitative interviews with eleven girl delegates, I interrogate the regulatory effects of the Girl Effect paradigm and examine the ways in which girls understand the invest in girls message. The Girl Effect logic, I suggest discursively (re)produces oppositional girlhoods and neoliberal girl power, which problematically displace girls human rights in favor of the missionary girl power logic (Sensoy and Marshall 2010). Using the tools of discursive deconstruction and voice-centered research (VCR), I investigate how girl delegates bring meaning to their political selves and girlhood(s); and reveal the normative and transformative (Taft 2010) possibilities for girls' political subjectivity and agency vis-à-vis the Girl Effect paradigm.
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Ireland