Girls’ Everyday Acts of Resistance: Evidence from Nine Countries
By: Rosie Walters (she/her) and Jenny Rivett (she/her)
In recent years, international development organisations, international institutions, governments, and transnational corporations all seem to agree that girls in the Global South are the solution to global poverty. Campaigns like the Nike Foundation’s Girl Effect and the UN Foundation’s Girl Up argue that if a girl in the Global South is given an education or a loan to start a business, she will work hard, get a job, marry later, have fewer, healthier children, and so be in a position to help her family and even wider community. If we invest in all girls in the Global South, the argument goes, we might just lift every community out of poverty.
While portrayals of girls as capable of achieving great things are an attempt to move away from historically very patronising representations of women and girls in the Global South as passive victims, they still depict them as capable and intelligent only as a result of interventions dreamt up by international development organisations based in the Global North. In other words, Southern girls are still presented as awaiting rescue.
In our article, Understanding Girls’ Everyday Acts of Resistance: Evidence from a Longitudinal Study in Nine Countries, we explore how adolescent girls in nine countries are taking action for themselves to challenge gender inequalities that negatively impact girls in their communities. We use Shenila Khoja-Moolji’s strategy of ‘Reading against the Grain’ to explore examples of girls pushing back against gendered rules and expectations, and in some cases, changing attitudes in their households and communities. We do so not because we think girls can, or should have to, change gender inequalities all by themselves. But, rather, because we are interested in acknowledging what girls are already doing and asking how and when adults and organisations might support those efforts.
We draw on data from Plan International’s Real Choices Real Lives study – a qualitative, longitudinal study with girls and their caregivers in nine countries: Benin, Brazil, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Philippines, Togo, Uganda, and Vietnam. The study started in 2006, the year the girls were born, and has been interviewing initially their families and caregivers, and then from 2013 onwards the girls themselves. In 2019, Plan UK published a series of reports exploring how girls across all nine contexts were ‘challenging the gender rules’ by questioning restrictions on their behaviour and pushing back against sexism and discrimination in their communities. In our article, we explore how these girls challenge and negotiate rules that forbid them from having friendships with boys or taking part in supposedly ‘boys’’ games and sports, as they enter adolescence.
The results reveal some fascinating insights into how girls across very different contexts push back against the rules and restrictions they face, many of which assume that girls’ bodies, and sexuality, are inherently risky and they must not be allowed to interact with boys. Some girls rejected their parents’ views that boys were inherently more violent or always posed a threat to girls. For example, Chesa’s mother in the Philippines told the interviewer in 2019 that she warns her daughter every day that she “should avoid boys, not to be too near them because she’s a young lady now.” Chesa, however, told the interviewer separately that, “sometimes when we girls fight, I approach my male friends.” Here we can see Chesa rejecting simplistic stereotypes about the behaviour of girls and boys that define which make good friends, and which are prone to fighting.
Similarly, in Togo, Essohana’s mother said in 2019, “I do not want her to be friends with boys as they could trick her into pregnancy which would ruin her future. She doesn’t have any such relations with boys.” In contrast, Essohana told an interviewer in 2017 that she did have friends who were boys, but only played with them at school and not at home where her family can see her. Finally, Juliana in Brazil has battled for years against her grandmother’s rule that she mustn’t play football – her favourite game – with the boys, calling it “sexist.” By 2020, Juliana’s grandmother had relented, telling the interviewer that instead of forbidding it anymore, “I just watch, just warn them.” Juliana had succeeded in gaining a little bit more freedom to play the sport she loves.
Our findings show the importance of finding out what girls already know about changing attitudes in their communities. While they need support from adults to make change, they have a better understanding than anyone of what is and isn’t possible for girls where they live. The article also shows the exciting scope for feminist scholars of international relations to rethink how we theorise agency and resistance within dominant power structures. To date, much of this work has focused on adult women, but these findings clearly show a rich potential to study the agency of adolescent girls too.
Read the full article here: Understanding Girls’ Everyday Acts of Resistance: Evidence from a Longitudinal Study in Nine Countries
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Rosie Walters (she/her) is a lecturer in International Relations at Cardiff University’s School of Law and Politics with research interests in feminist, poststructuralist and postcolonial approaches to international relations. Her research focuses on how girls negotiate girl power discourses in development, finding space to put forward their own vision of what it means for girls to be empowered. @rosie_walters
Jenny Rivett (she/her) is an independent research consultant and a researcher on the Real Choices, Real Lives Cohort study. She has a Masters degree in Human Rights and her work focuses primarily on gender and adolescence, social norms, and child protection. @JR_Rivett