Girls in Crisis: Rescue and Transnational Feminist Autobiographical Resistance

Abstract

It often seems that girlhood has congealed into a single sad story in which imperiled girls await rescue, with limited hope or success. In this story, girls appear in perpetual crisis and permanently vulnerable not only because of dire circumstances but also because of something intransigent and intrinsic to girlhood itself. Girls in crisis make an ethical claim upon our attention, and they should; but the permanently vulnerable girl is a deceptively apolitical and amoral figure that blots out representations of gendered autonomy (political, ethical, and personal). By focusing on girls in this way, women do not appear as moral and political agents lodged in material conditions of harm, capable of analyzing these conditions and proposing means of remediation. The figure of the vulnerable girl is tied to the absent figuration of women as fully human and as political agents. As such, this representation recalls colonial and orientalist histories and the representational politics of racialization; and it is in this figuration that the vulnerable and racialized girl in crisis has become the focus of human rights campaigns, corporate philanthropy, and service learning projects based in the United States.