Governing Adolescent Reproduction in the ‘Developing World’: Biopower and Governmentality in Plan’s ‘Because I’m a Girl’ Campaign

Abstract

In this article, I analyse the discursive construction of adolescent pregnancy and childbearing as a development ‘problem’ in Plan’s ‘Because I’m a Girl’ campaign. I draw on existing scholarship that configures teenage pregnancy prevention campaigns in the ‘developed’ world as a site of biopolitics that seeks to maximise the well-being of the population by governing adolescent girls’ reproductive and sexual behaviours. Identifying Plan’s campaign as part of a larger turn towards adolescent girls in development discourse and policy, I also draw on a growing body of scholarship that examines how campaigns targeting adolescent girls reinforce neo-liberal understandings of ‘development’ as achievable through the empowerment of individuals rather than through structural change. I argue that by discursively constructing adolescent pregnancy and parenthood as risky, Plan’s campaign reinforces reproductive norms of delayed reproduction and sexual debut, according to which adolescent girls in the ‘developing’ world are expected to comply. The campaign’s goal of ‘empowerment’ thus acts as a means of constructing adolescent girls as responsible reproductive decision makers who will break the ‘cycle of poverty’ by making rational reproductive and sexual choices. Thus, although Plan’s ‘Because I’m a Girl’ campaign addressed important issues, including adolescent girls’ right to reproductive autonomy, their focus on empowerment operates as a form of biopower that pursues the project of development through the regulation of girls’ reproduction and sexuality.