Speaking well: The benevolent public and rhetorical production of neoliberal political economy

Abstract

This essay shows how race and gender are central to the rhetorical production of neoliberal political economy. It examines how the mainstream and feminist-appearing movement for girls’ empowerment is in service of the continued production of neoliberal political economy and in service of cultivating a benevolent public based on a sense of economic exceptionalism—a new form of the bourgeois public sphere that values neoliberalism and positive actions of charity and goodwill taken on another’s behalf. The production of neoliberal political economy and the formation of a benevolent neoliberal public sphere, particularly around girls’ empowerment, is animated by racialized and gendered girl-empowerment discourses which link particular young brown bodies to arguments about girls’ potential (economic and otherwise), educational aspirations, economic investment, and international security.

Since the early 2000s, global development agencies like the UN, World Bank, and USAID have made a remarkable rhetorical shift in their policies and development plans from twentieth-century-development arguments about protecting and saving innocent children (e.g. Save the Children and Children’s Rights) to twenty-first-century arguments centralizing and showcasing girls as empowered agents of development and local and global change (e.g. Girls’ Empowerment). The change to focus on girls came after nearly two decades of development policies that concentrated on women and economic development. This “Smart Economics” platform (see, e.g. Revenga & Shetty, 2012; World Bank, 2006) supposes that women will always work harder and be more productive than men, use their income to support their family (and not frivolously spend it), and invest any extra income altruistically to support peaceful communities (Wilson, 2017, p. 446). Girls have been folded into this Smart Economics platform because policymakers assume that, as former Managing Director of the World Bank and Nigerian Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala stated at the World Economic Forum, “investing in girls, catching them upstream, is even smarter economics” because if “you invest in girls, if you educate girls, you get girls into jobs, you solve so many problems” (Women’s UN Report Network [WUNRN], 2018, p. 1).

The Smart Economics platform demonstrates a sort of pseudo-feminism—a neoliberal feminism that promotes agency, potential, empowerment, personal responsibility, tenacity, and marketability while ignoring the structural and actual violence (poverty, structural adjustment, war, ethnic tensions, etc.) that may constrain women and girls’ lives (Dingo, 2012; Moeller, 2018; Murphy, 2012/2013). Moreover, Smart Economics encompasses liberal feminist beliefs that having a job and thus access to money will “solve so many problems.” An extension of the Smart Economics platform, girl empowerment initiatives similarly focus on girls’ personal responsibility, willingness to be educated, and marketable potentiality as self-sufficient laborers. Much like the “gender equality is smart economics platform” (World Bank, 2018), girl empowerment initiatives aim to make girls educated workers (potentially in high-tech factories), possible consumers (of factory produced items), and altruistic community members who will work for peace. These girl empowerment initiatives have extended beyond the development realm and into the public where speeches from girls such as Malala Yousafzai, Yeonmi Park, and even Emma Gonzalez are showcased in various mainstream media outlets to display empowered Brown-girl-agents ¹ of national and international change.

This essay examines how the mainstream and feminist-appearing movement for girls’ empowerment is in service of the continued production of neoliberal political economy and in service of cultivating a benevolent public based on a sense of economic exceptionalism—a new form of the bourgeois public sphere that values neoliberalism and positive actions of charity and goodwill taken on another’s behalf. ² While some scholars have argued that difference is neutralized within neoliberal political economy to make arguments that elide how structural power shapes community circumstances (see, e.g. Asen, 2017; Brown, 2015), I wish to tweak this argument slightly to say that racialized and gendered differences are central to the rhetorical production and material impact of neoliberal political economy. The production of neoliberal political economy and the formation of a benevolent neoliberal public sphere, particularly around girls’ empowerment, is animated by racialized and gendered girl-empowerment discourses which link particular young brown bodies to arguments about girls’ potential (economic and otherwise), educational aspirations, economic investment, and international security. Yet, as this benevolent public sphere forms around racialized representations, it is made up of those who have the most social and economic capital—often cis-gender, able-bodied, White, and economically secure women. Indeed, although the rhetoric of girl’s empowerment appears to be a progressive and feminist project—who does not want empowered, agentive girls?—it is actually a “smokescreen” for the “destructive impact of global capital accumulation” and its expansion (Wilson, 2017, p. 432).

I demonstrate how neoliberal political economy and its supporting communicative practices centralize “atomistic individuals as a singular and universal sphere of activity” and valorize personal agency, self-sufficiency, and financial and market values over human relationships and the common good (Asen, 2017, p. 330). It is through these rhetorics that global capital accumulates and expands. My goal is to consider how examining the intersections of capitalist neoliberal political economy, location, race, and gender can improve our understanding of rhetorical production, the formation of the benevolent neoliberal public, and the continuation of particular relations of nation-state power. These intersections are also central to understanding why certain girls are represented as “good” and then are showcased and get to speak, and how others do not. This rhetorical production of neoliberal political economy ultimately impacts the public’s understanding and engagement with and against neoliberal global capital, shores up nation-state power, and can fuel economic exceptionalism and political alliances with some nations and not others.

I use girl-empowerment initiatives and empowered third-world-Brown-girl figures to show how difference—in this case race, gender, and geopolitical difference—is actually valorized to construct a benevolent public based on economic exceptionalism. I turn to one representative girl-empowerment text—”Smart Economics”—and one empowered Brown girl-empowerment figure, Malala Yousafzai, to show how these patterns of representation do not generate multiple forms of empowerment and thus limit how publics are politically engaged. Concluding on a more hopeful note, I place these commonly circulated and repetitive messages of girls’ empowerment against another narrative of a single girl (a girl named Ahed Tamimi) and her activism that has not cultivated a benevolent neoliberal public. I suggest that Ahed Tamimi’s story of the activist bad girl acting out shows marks of counterpublic resistance to both the empowered girl set forth by the public and the state. Although her resistance is solitary, her actions are not. Her resistance and the media’s coverage of it marks her as uncontrolled and dangerous—a striking contrast to the exaltation given to the resistance of Yousafaszi. Tamimi presents an example of gendered and racialized resistant public action that does not forward the agenda of the neoliberal nation-state.

Cultivating a benevolent public through empowerment stories

Girl empowerment rhetorics are common public and political messages about girls and their potential to be self-sufficient laborers and leaders in their communities. I suggest that girl empowerment rhetorics—with their images of Brown-third-world- girl agents—work to shore up the neoliberal political economic values that maintain nations in the West’s control. Within these rhetorics, certain Brown girls (i.e. those who embrace neoliberalism and who perform or represent certain racialized features and coded behaviors) are seen as “good” and worthy of benevolence. As seemingly independent and even feminist rhetorical agents, empowered girls offer raced and gendered figures for a benevolent public to connect with, as the figures appear to counter threats of extremism and maintain international security while reflecting back a sort of feminism that ignores structural violence in favor of personal agency. This section considers how stories of empowered girls create public identities and thus cultivate a benevolent public. As I show below, stories that centralize the values of neoliberal political economy alongside particular racialized and gendered rhetorical patterns are more powerful than others in creating these public identities. These rhetorical patterns demarcate how some girls are worthy subjects of empowerment and others worthy of neglect.

The public encounters these girl empowerment rhetorics in a variety of places ranging from global development plans and agentive speakers I mention above, who have appeared on TV, to magazine covers and the New York City subway (which, in 2015, had a campaign for local girls’ empowerment plastered all over its subway cars), to airport advertisements for nonprofits such as Care International, to Girl Scout cookie promotions. Such advertisements and promotions typically show a lone girl who looks directly at the camera and who is often holding a book and who, due to her clothing and background, the audience might assume is from the so-called third world. In short, images showcasing agentive girls (and more frequently agentive Brown girls) are found in a variety of public spaces. More developed stories in the form of films or PSAs about similar girls have been put out by NGOs and sometimes in partnership with corporations (see, for example, Girl Up, Girl Rising, the Girl Effect, to name a few); those stories can be found on their public websites. Certain members of the public might circulate these stories on social media.

The stories, as I demonstrate further below, are not unique. They typically center on one Brown-third-world girls’ struggle (her parents have sold her, she married too young, she is abused, her education options are limited due to being a girl, her voice is stifled, etc.) and then how she single-handedly overcame those struggles, and how, as a result, she is improving her community and nation. Such stories position certain members of the public as saviors because they tend to ask for viewers to financially invest in or purchase from their organization and/or they figuratively ask viewers to be neoliberal cultural ambassadors who can, across and despite international boundaries and cultural differences, support young girls’ individual empowerment by consuming and circulating the representations.

The agentive, empowered girl story—the story of the good girl speaking well ³ —persuades an elite and pseudo-feminist public to be benevolent because the stories model back a certain type of feminist agency that centralizes personal responsibility alongside voice, career aspirations, and consumption. Yet, the stories also suggest that such empowered and agentive good girls then safeguard their communities and nations’ economic security and in turn safe guard the benevolent public. Nancy Fraser (2013) recently wrote a critique of this kind of feminism: “feminist ideas that once formed part of a radical worldview are increasingly expressed in individualist terms. Where feminists once criticized a society that promoted careerism, they now advise women to ‘lean in.’ A movement that once prioritized social solidarity now celebrates female entrepreneurs. A perspective that once valorized ‘care’ and interdependence now encourages individual advancement and meritocracy.” The girl empowerment initiatives create a benevolent public that forms around the very sort of pseudo-neoliberal feminist agency noted by Fraser. In other words, the stories themselves (as described in the next section) cultivate particular public identities because they draw from members’ sense of benevolence, limited political participation, and economic exceptionalism.

A benevolent neoliberal public, then, takes action on someone’s behalf and yet that public is attracted to how powerless others (like third-world Brown girls) can become agents despite unequal power relationships, because their stories reflect an easy neoliberal and pseudo-feminist “good girl” narrative that appears reachable. Visually, girl-empowerment stories vaguely centralize third-world-Brown girls who are alone, who appear beautiful and exotic (and different from mainstream US or other Western women), and who (via camera angles) appear wide-eyed and innocent. As a result, these stories also tend to mask subjugation and coercion alongside structural violence making the narrative quite simple and enticing: investing emotionally and materially in agentive Brown-third-world girls will, to repeat what, Okonjo-Iweala said above, “solve so many problems.” This benevolent public is thus assured of their exceptionalism—they are cosmopolitan, feminist, multicultural, and capitalist.

Members of the neoliberal benevolent public sphere “see political attachments as an amalgam of reflexive opinion and visceral gut feeling” (Berlant, 2005, p. 47). Girl empowerment rhetorics create public identities by offering affective and reflexive US-centered, neoliberal values; these values tap into gut beliefs about all girls’ potential to rise above structural inequalities and violence and do anything they might set their minds to do. As feminist scholar Jodi Dean (2009) has noted, neoliberalism thrives though a “restructuring of political possibility” (p. 73). Girls within empowerment initiatives appear as potential political agents (see Murphy, 2018). As a result, third-world-Brown-girls whose stories easily align with the expectations of a benevolent public represent future possibility rather than the present realities of their nations. Moreover, because girls manifest potentiality, the public can simply project their desired future on them. Their potential and aspirations mark them as good girls worthy of benevolence. Yet, as subjects of possibility, third-world girl’s agentive political possibility functions as a way to quell the public’s fears of the results of inequalities between countries by showing girls in control of their own destinies and as having the same aspirations as those residing in the west. To the benevolent public, these girls’ agency feels very familiar; their controlled and empowered agency makes the public feel safe, as none of the examples of the good empowered third-world-Brown-girl I will address below call out state-sanctioned violence or unequal geopolitical economic arrangements. When they do, their stories fail to draw a public’s attention, and they do not become figures to rally around. As a result, represented desire and potential of Brown-third-world-girls to be productive laborers who are independent agents of national change and thus international peace become a point of engagement and an issue of seemingly mutual concern for members of the benevolent public. In other words, third-world-Brown-girls symbolize potential—the potential that all girls, despite their race, ethnicity, and geopolitical location, can be brought into the cultural and economic status quo and become part of the neoliberal public. In this way, race and difference appears flattened out because the girl empowerment rhetorics tell a story whereby the playing field is level and gender, race, ethnic, and global structural inequalities are irrelevant.

However, as communication scholar Lisa Flores (2016) has made clear that race is central to all “questions of impact, influence, or circulation … argument and audience, … affect and materiality[.]” (p. 7). Likewise, Lisa Duggan (2003) and Kalpana Wilson (2017) each separately have demonstrated that the politics of race and gender have been deeply central to the rhetorical production of neoliberalism, its value, and its supposed possibilities. In a neoliberal political economic system of value, the focus is on the individual, empowered agent over the larger structures of violence such as racism or racial inequalities. Scholars Lisa Lowe (2015) and Grace Hong (2011) each argue benevolent gestures and stories that valorize racial differences often ally with the values of the nation-state and serve to shore up the global power of particular nation-states. Lowe (2015) makes clear in her study of 19th-century imperialism that “capitalism exploits through culturally and socially constructed differences such as race, gender, region, and nationality, and [racialized capital is reproduced] through those uneven formations” (pp. 149–150). Hong (2011) similarly observes how nation-states employ a variety of discursive and rhetorical techniques to direct and control populations to create new or sustain old capitalist markets. Agentive and empowered Brown girls from poor countries who demonstrate self-reliance appear to be confined to their own nation-state. In other words, the narrative that we do not explicitly hear in these global girl-empowerment campaigns is one about how educated Brown-third-world girls can potentially offer bodies for emerging markets and labor, particularly as the technology industry grows and becomes more complicated. We only hear a pseudo-feminist argument about girl’s empowerment through neoliberal values. Thus, these empowered girls—who are both contained and agentive—are central to neoliberal global capitalist production.

As a result, girl empowerment rhetorics encourage the model of neoliberal publicity (the pseudo-feminist one noted by Fraser above) that at once incorporates yet renders invisible racial, gender, and geopolitical inequalities to capture a benevolent public’s attention. Arguments that support neoliberal capital tend to incorporate previously excluded others to rhetorically level the playing field and forge a collective benevolent public without attending to structures of power. Thus, this sort of inclusion is dangerous because it neither addresses how capital continues to accumulate in alliance with nation-state power, nor does it address how different forms of power (disciplinary, patriarchal, racial, etc.) continue to work in tandem.

For neoliberal political economy to thrive, then, it needs a benevolent public, and that public has come to rally around particular racialized, gendered, and culturally specific transnational representations of worth girls who shore up this political economy. What Jaspir Puar (2006, p. 67) has said about homo-nationalism—“the idealization of the US as a properly multicultural heteronormative but nevertheless gay-friendly, tolerant, and sexually liberated society”—can be said about the narrative of the empowered girl. Despite material unevenness, girls reflect an idealization of what it means to be a multicultural and cosmopolitan benevolent public. Neoliberal political economy is supported by rhetorics of individualism, personal responsibility, and agency without structural change, and it is supported by the formation of a public sphere that enacts its exceptionalism by promoting particular sorts of gendered and racialized representations so that they have something that ensures democratic values of multiculturalism and equality. Ultimately, this capitalist political economy is structured by very cultural ideologies that appear in girl empowerment to create profit for some while quietly exploiting others (see Duggan, 2003; Hong, 2011; Lowe, 2015; Mohanty, 2003; Riedner, 2015; Wilson, 2015). As I show below through specific examples, within this system of value, stories of some lives and ways of being (those of good girls) are valorized and others fail to resonate—particularly those whose labor, sexuality/reproduction, citizenship, age, ability, and ethnicity fall outside of these values. At the same time, even other lives and ways of being are valued for their potential, and that potential in a neoliberal system becomes a form of capital.

Defining third-world Brown girl empowerment rhetorics

Stories of good agentive girls use particular iterations of race, gender, and capital work together to form a rhetoric of girls empowerment that “both draws upon and extends the differential and racialized valuation of lives, and provides legitimacy for a new phase” of neoliberal capital and garners the formation of a benevolent public (Wilson, 2017, p. 433). The PSA from the Girl Effect—a partnership between Nike and the UN—demonstrates a set of good and worthy agentive girls who warrant empowerment. The stories told about these girls reflect how neoliberalism has recuperated feminism by limiting state power and legitimizing the market and labor as a form of freedom (see Fraser, 2013).

I use the PSA to show the rhetorical codes that are common across most girl-empowerment stories. These rhetorical codes can also be seen in the widely recognized figure (not the actual person) of Malala Youzafsai and her UN speech on the Taliban. Youzafsai is the quintessential “good girl speaking well.” She is a young Muslim woman who was saved by the West; she speaks about and demonstrates Western neoliberal values of personal tenacity and the embracement of education over structural change.

The 2014 Girl Effect video titled “Smart Economics” demonstrates what feminist and girl-study scholars have called the “girling” of development (see Bent, 2016; Moeller, 2014; Murphy, 2012/2013). Race, gender, age, and nation work together to form girl-empowerment rhetorics and stories of good agentive girls who are in service to neoliberal political economy and values. Unstated yet assumed is the rhetorical premise that girls are already hardworking, altruistic, and entrepreneurial. Clearly stated is the assumption that girls will, with very little infrastructural change, garner their nation more money than it borrows yearly from development agencies. The PSA focuses on Ethiopia’s economic growth and girls’ place and gendered challenges to this growth. In “Smart Economics” we are introduced to five girls “who are eager to complete their education and willing to work” and who stand for the 9 million girls in Ethiopia who, as the clip suggests, have the personal will and thus potential not only to escape poverty but also to grow Ethiopia’s economy by “four billion dollars” “if every girl finished school” (Girl Hub Ethiopia, 2014). Each girl faces a challenge due to her gender and economic status.

This PSA is quite similar to other Girl Effect PSAs and quite similar to the stories told, for example, in the World Bank’s Adolescent Girl Initiative, USAID’s Let Girls Learn campaign, and many others. Like them, the Girl Effect typically portrays Brown girls from Muslim, Asian, African, South American, or Middle Eastern countries, and they tend, much like this PSA, to suggest that girls are at risk due to stereotypically “backward” cultural practices—early marriage, early motherhood, rape and domestic violence, primitive technologies, tradition, and gendered violence (particularly “Brown” predatory men from their own communities). Yet, the suggestion is that this risk can be mitigated through education and a willingness to work. I chose the “Smart Economics” video precisely because it follows this very racialized and gendered pattern that connects girls’ potential and education to economic growth—a clear neoliberal narrative. Yet, in addition we see the pattern where girls who get educations automatically build their nation’s economy because they routinely enter into formalized professional labor, despite the fact that, in many countries, all young people struggle to find adequate professional labor.

The first girl in “Smart Economics” is poor, and her challenge is to not be married off by her parents. The film suggests that, in addition to her strong will, if her parents just keep her in school she will be economically successful. The next girl is overburdened by chores that keep her from studying—“she does five times the amount of chores as her brother”—and the answer to her plight is better technology (a better cooking stove). She is portrayed then as studying while cooking. With both these girls we hear little about two important things: the economic structures that may give parents the difficult choice of marrying off a daughter or not and the gendered structures whereby it is ok that girls do more domestic labor than boys.

The third hypothetical girl, at 16, is challenged by early pregnancy and a violent and sexually demanding husband. With education, the PSA suggests, this girl will be able to have access to birth control and will be able to better say “no” to her husband. Within this story, we see how two stereotypical raced and gendered characters—a Brown girl from Ethiopia, who at 16 has one child already and another on the way, is shown to be excessively fertile and her Brown husband as excessively and dangerously hypersexual. It is not the gendered relations of power or the infrastructure that surrounds them that is the problem, it is that the girl is uneducated and thus does not know about birth control and does not have the agency to say no to her husband. There is no talk of educating her husband about birth control and respect for women and their bodies. Rather, it is her lack of education and agency, her lack of potential that stifles her ability to be productive for her nation’s economy.

Two things hinder the fourth girl: the lack of passible roads but also the seemingly dangerous men she will encounter if she walks to sell her goats. Racialized representations of men as apathetic, indolent, helpless have in the past been used to justify colonial interventions but within neoliberal (and arguably neocolonial) discourses and, more recently, development initiatives, which represent men as violent, sexually predatory, and dangerous (see Bedford, 2009), they appear out of control. Yet, within these narratives, educated women and girls will be the ones to control these men; such a representation quells the public’s decades-long fear of Black and Brown men in the United States.

It is important to recognize that these sorts of gendered, racialized narratives of development are central to neoliberal structural violence because poverty, lack of access to services, and even gendered-based violence are not communicated as being due to a political or economic climate but due to pure individual will and agency—the will to be educated, the will to work, and the will to speak out. The girls in this brief PSA demonstrate clearly the rhetorical power of the neoliberal pseudo-feminist “racialized hyper-industrious and entrepreneurial female subject” (Wilson, 2015, p. 819). As Wilson further points out:

The focus on the pre-reproductive, pre-labouring years is thoroughly neoliberal in that intervention via education is constructed as necessary only to produce the idealized neoliberal subject who can negotiate unfettered and unregulated markets with ease, while simultaneously assuming full responsibility for social reproduction. (p. 819)

As a result, the Girl Effect and global girl-empowerment narratives easily map onto benevolent publics and reflect and activate a sort of neoliberal pseudo-feminism in their target viewers. Members of the benevolent neoliberal public are not directly helping or saving poor girls but rather positioning them as agents in the same way that they see themselves. These third-world girls are always, without saying, positioned against their White northern peers who are invited to participate and empower other girls through purchasing girl “merch” (see, for example, https://girlup.org/store-2/#sthash.6fD9k4 m5.dpbs) and leading girls toward enlightened neoliberalism and post-feminism where girls in the north, with their education, social connections, access to media and technology, see themselves as already empowered and not oppressed—which we, of course, know is not true. Members of the benevolent public through this sort of activism further Fraser’s (2013) recognition that the tenets of feminism have been replaced by market values. The girls who need empowerment reside in places outside the West and girls who are empowered to purchase products that support empowerment, are already empowered.

The good girl speaking well

This recognition of the pseudo-feminist neoliberal public and utility of these girl-empowerment rhetorics for the West is important. While the above girl-empowerment narratives demarcate the steps that a Brown-third-world-girl can make to become a successful neoliberal subject (or a good girl speaking well), my next examples demonstrate which girls can be appropriate agents of resistance and thus absorbed by and into the state and the benevolent public and which girls cannot.

In my next example, I turn away from the common stories of girl empowerment used by NGOs like Girl Effect and turn to another girl who has become a galvanizing figure around girls’ empowerment through education: Malala Yousafzai. I place her figure against girl-empowerment development discourses to demonstrate the common rhetorical moves that reproduce and thus shore up neoliberal political economy and a benevolent public. I am less interested for this article in what Yousafzai has written and said unprompted about girls and empowerment, but I am more interested in what she has come to stand for.

In her discussion of “others” and “other-others,” rhetorical scholar Jennifer Wingard (2013) states that “‘others’ are the people the nation can ‘save’ or show ‘benevolence’ to by allowing the nation to become multicultural” (p. 5). Yousafzai’s image is used to represent what will happen to all girls should they be educated and enabled to speak like her. Her image, like those of the girls in the “Smart Economics” PSA, demonstrates the sanctity and safety of neoliberal cultural values because the image promotes education over violence, personal change over structural change, and peacefulness over violence. I place Yousafazai against a lesser known agentive girl, Palestinian anti-state violence activist Ahed Tamimi (from Nabi Saleh, West Bank in the occupied territory of Palestine), because she, as Wingard (2013) drawing from Sara Ahmed might note, represents an “other-other,” “the one who cannot be interpolated into culture” because her actions and words stand in contrast to benevolence (p. 5). The widespread support for Yousafzai demonstrates how the benevolent neoliberal public quietly aligns with US nation-state power and objectives. Tamimi’s activism also demonstrates what the public and nation do not value and what they find threatening. In fact, the lack of support for Tamimi’s activism has material effects. I suggest that, on one hand, these dominant racialized and gendered neoliberal discourses that are supported by Yousafzai’s figure can serve to render lives less valuable and make death more acceptable. Not only does a worthy neoliberal subject—a good girl—have to be a person who is in charge of her destiny and her empowerment, she must not name the very state-sponsored structural or physical violence or global structures that frame her agency. On the other hand, Tamimi’s activism can form a counterpublic. While she draws attention for both actual and structural violence, she presents as a singular bad girl acting out.

To make this final point, I contrast these two girls to demonstrate how race, gender, and some sorts of sanctioned gendered-performed activism are central to neoliberal systems of value and show how some forms of activism offer a legible rallying point for the benevolent neoliberal public. Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 at the age of 17 for her work advocating for girls’ education in Pakistan. Tamimi, currently age 16, recently made international headlines for slapping an Israeli officer who entered her yard (Halbfinger, 2017). She was subsequently arrested and was, until very recently, held in detention for her actions. Tamimi and her family have been vocally opposed to the expansion of Israeli settlements and detention of Palestinians and especially vocal about state-sanctioned violence against Palestinians including violence against children and theft of water and land. Tamimi has put herself in between soldiers and children and has been especially vocal about children’s rights after her cousin was severely injured by a rubber bullet. Both Yousafzai and Tamimi have spoken out publicly at international conferences about drone warfare and gendered violence. Yet, as academic journalist Shenila Khoja-Moolji (2017) notes in a recent opinion piece on Al Jazeera’s news site, despite the fact that both Yousafzai and Tamimi as girls have a long history of speaking out publicly about injustice, Yousafzai’s story and her speeches have been widely circulated and celebrated by feminists and by the mainstream media (see, for example, Khoja-Moolji, 2017). Yousafzai is invited to speak all over the United States and the world, and she has written several books for a variety of ages. ⁴ Tamimi’s travel, on the other hand, has been limited: she was unable to obtain a visa to the United States for a speaking tour, and there are few English-language articles written about her in the mainstream media.

The contrast and scope of the uptake of these two young figures’ narratives raise questions for rhetoricians about what these narratives say and do, what (and who) is represented as worthy of benevolence, and how some young-women figures are galvanized to represent a value or nation-state and others do not. Moreover, the examples raise questions of public reception: why do benevolent citizens who are tuned into global gender discourses hear and see Yousafzai speeches but not Tamimi’s? Why has Yousafzai, as a figure of girl’s empowerment, galvanized a wide range of social actors in a benevolent public, from world leaders to young women, but Tamimi’s speech, acts, and actions (slapping a soldier, putting her body between a child and a soldier, etc.) fail to create political momentum in the West? I suggest that the answer to these question lies less in the words that either girl says—or in their actual agency—and more in their legibility to a benevolent public consumed within neoliberal governmentality.

Yousafzai’s image and narrative is essentially a rescue narrative. She is saved from what is often represented as a “backward” and dangerous-to-women country (Pakistan), brought to the West (England), and educated to become a proper neoliberal subject. Her story is easily conscripted into dominant ideas of benevolence within the United States. For example, Yousafzai’s story of being shot in the face and then flown to England for surgery began as a story about a single Pakistani girl who was saved from the Taliban. In the following days, the tale was circulated all over Western media ranging from the New York Times, LA Times, CNN, Time Magazine, ABC News, The Guardian, and the Telegraph to name just a few. Once the media recognized Yousafzai as an advocate for girl’s education and as somebody who was against the Taliban, her story generated even more coverage and eventually earned her the Noble Peace Prize. Images of her standing alone on a podium dressed in sari and with her head covered and delivering her acceptance speech abound across social and mainstream media.

The public consumption of Yousafzai’s story begins with racialized and gendered violence—physical violence done directly on her body when she was shot in the face on the way to school by a religious/political faction that does not believe girls should be educated (or at least a political faction that uses violence against girls as a weapon of war). Scholars such as Wendy Hesford and Wendy Kozol (2005) have noted, over the past almost 20 years and post 9/11 that Brown girls from poor Muslim countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan have been viewed through gendered rescue narratives, where women and girls are depicted as victims of religious-based patriarchy who are in need of saving. Like the girls in the Girl Effect video discussed above, Yousafzai is depicted as both normative and exceptional; she stands out as a Brown Muslim girl because her individual acts of bravery, leadership, intellect, and capacity to speak well mark her as standing against the stereotypical belief that young Muslim girls are all oppressed by religious patriarchal structures (Hesford, 2013). Her image, almost always standing alone at a podium and demurely dressed in a sari with her head partially covered, contrasts with audiences’ understanding about young Brown girls in Pakistan. She is both traditionally and wholly Muslim but speaks about Western-based neoliberal values of education and agency—a narrative that has been alive for decades. The violent events that Yousafzai experienced offers the perfect victim for a classic colonial savior narrative but with a neoliberal twist—England sweeps in and takes care of her medical needs, but she rises and becomes an empowered and agentive public speaker. The events follow several decades of the United States using the Taliban’s threat of dismantling girls’ education as a justification for war against them.

As well, the narrative interpellates a stereotypical image of Muslim women as victims into a contemporary moment, aligning it with current geopolitical interests of the United States and the UN in Pakistan and nearby Afghanistan. Yousafzai’s image (and the gendered violence done to her) fits with the long-standing image of Muslim women in need of saving (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Hesford & Kozol, 2005; Mohanty, 2003). Decades-long colonial representations of Pakistani and Muslim women racially mark such women as demure victims of oppressive regimes. This discourse harkens back to the dominant rescue narrative of “white men saving brown women from brown men” (Spivak, 1999, p. 303). Yet, Yousafzai exceeds the rescue frame because she is portrayed as a good, agentive, individual girl speaking well. She is portrayed as an agentive hero, a smart and brave young Muslim woman who speaks truth to patriarchal and religious power. As a result, her story diverts attention from the coercive, eugenic, and violent geopolitical practices from this time period that frame women as in need of saving (Mohanty, 2003), moving attention away from violence from the outside to internal, sectarian violence. Never mind that in public speeches, Yousafzai herself critiques drone warfare that, at the time of the violent attack upon her, was responsible for the significant loss of civilian lives. In a meeting with President Obama in 2013, Yousafzai stood up to Obama and clearly explained to him that drone violence actually fuels terrorism; yet, this is not the dominant story told about her (CNN Political Unit, 2013). Rather, her story of tenacity and agency and then the speeches that receive more press divert attention from geopolitical violence by focusing on localized conflict.

As an example, Yousafzai’s acceptance speech for when she won the Noble Peace Prize is often cited. While the speech calls for women to work together toward education, the dominant focus is on herself as one girl among many. She states:

So here I stand … one girl among many.

I speak—not for myself, but for all girls and boys.

I raise up my voice—not so that I can shout, but so that those without a voice can be heard. (United Nations News, 2015, p. 1)

In other words, the “political grammar” attributed to Yousafazai is used by politicians, development leaders, heads of state, leaders of women’s groups, and so on to tell a positive, individual story of heroism and redemption without addressing the multiple and ongoing violences that were responsible for the attack on Yousafzai (Hemmings, 2011). Individualizing this story is a hallmark of neoliberal rhetoric that values individual action and self-responsibility but not collective action and responsibility (Duggan, 2003). In this neoliberal political grammar, educational initiatives (and educational activism) are lauded as a way to bring a nation under control and to make that country more economically viable and safe for Western investment. In fact, as Wilson (2017, p. 439) has suggested, recent arguments for education in poor regions of the world demonstrate a rhetorical reframing of population control in poor regions that aligns with neoliberal narratives of personal responsibility and shifts attention away from more obviously egregious ways of controlling populations such as sterilization and fertility control to conversations about birth control and choice. Given these contexts, my concern is that the representation of Yousafzai in the stories that circulate about her is a metonymic disavowal—saving one young, Muslim woman from religious/political factionalism comes to stand for the capacity to save all Muslim women and teach them to save themselves. Or, the will to save one Muslim women stands for a collective public benevolent will that actually does not need to demonstrate that anyone besides Yousafzai has been saved. As a result, the public’s attention is shifted to a young empowered agent and not drone violence or geopolitical and economic investments.

I am not critiquing Yousafzai’s actions and speech per se, but drawing attention to how and why a particular version of her image and speech is celebrated and why her more nuanced critique of imperialism and poverty, present, for example, in her autobiography (Yousafzai & McCormick, 2014), is not given attention. Portrayals of Yousafzai identify her as an extremely thoughtful and important feminist figure but do not focus much on state-sanctioned or imperial violence or the very global relationships that aid the continued conflicts in Pakistan. Rather, she is presented as an advocate for education and (gendered) peacemaking. Moreover, as feminist and race scholar Jennifer Nash (2014) has noted, female bodies of color are “regularly captured and decontextualized … to offer an account of the waning power of racism and to visually manage a history of racial violence” (p. 45). She notes that such representations serve to suggest that racism has been addressed and is in the past, and we can therefore go about our business and not worry about it. Reading through Nash’s observations of women of color, Yousafzai’s image mitigates and enables a narrative for a benevolent public that claims to address gender violence while also justifying geopolitical arrangements that bring justice to a wronged young woman. It relies upon allowing this public to unsee racialized and gendered structural violence because the benevolent public appears to be investing in hopeful narratives where agentive girls become strong, independent, outspoken women—part of the very tenets of neoliberal rhetorics.

Yet, this broader analysis of racialization is not the image or narrative about Yousafzai that circulates: what circulates are stories about how she single-handedly worked for girls’ education and about her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech where she explains just how important education is and what she risked to achieve it. As another example, Time Magazine named Yousafzai as one of the one hundred most influential people in 2013 (Mcallester, 2014). The story that accompanies her photograph is one where she is depicted like any other teenager “playing it cool,” but who is quoted as saying about the Taliban, “Even if they come to kill me I will tell them what they are trying to do is wrong, that education is our basic right.”

Yet, in lesser known comments against drone violence, she makes connections between imperial violence, poverty, and gendered violence. But these kinds of arguments fade from the dominant representation of her, raising questions about how persuasive appeals to neoliberal pseudo-feminism might persuade Western audiences to forget imperial power and how hidden agendas might reinstate powerful interests (Vinson, 2018, p. 9). The racialized and ethnicized rhetorical grammar imagery is deployed to represent Yousafzai and works to align her with a benevolent and neoliberal public by showing that educated young women can embody values of freedom, curiosity, intelligence, and drive.

The bad girl acting out

Ahed Tamimi wholly counters this narrative, and her story does not beg for benevolence because she critiques infrastructure and structural violence. As a result, she fails to produce a benevolent public. Since Tamimi was 10 years old, she and her family have been vocally opposed to the expansion of Israeli settlements and detention of Palestinians and especially vocal about state-sanctioned violence against Palestinians including violence against children and theft of water and land. While there are some stories about Tamimi that circulate in mainstream Western media, including one in the New York Times (Halbfinger, 2017), there are few examples of her public advocacy. Although she also has spoken about violence against children, her narrative falls flat because as Shenila Khoja-Moolji, (2017) states, “Her feminism is political, rather than one centered on commodities and sex. Her girl power threatens to reveal the ugly face of settler-colonialism, and hence is marked as ‘dangerous.’”

Yet, because Tamimi breaks normative frames of mainstream neoliberal pseudo-feminism and because she does not act like a good girl speaking well, I suggest her narrative does not circulate; it is not galvanized by (neoliberal) feminists or multi-laterally aligned NGOs. However, what it does do is offer an example of counterpublic resistance (see Warner, 2002), even as she appears to act as an individual because she distorts and exposes the limitations of neoliberal culture. Unlike the image and best-known speeches of Yousafzai, who as a speaker embodies demure and feminine individualism and who stands alone and draws attention to individual voice, Tamimi calls attention to the responsibility of the global community over the individual actor. When she uses “I,” it is coupled with a “we” statement.

Moreover, Tamimi is represented as wild-eyed with unruly hair. She has punched, hit, and bitten Israeli soldiers. Photos show her standing (with other children) up to guards, standing between Israeli guards and children with her fists up, and yelling at Israeli guards. She appears emotionally out of control. Importantly, she does not wear a hijab or headscarf but instead T-shirts and jeans. She is not the “typical” Middle Eastern woman who needs a benevolent neoliberal public to save her. Instead, she embodies a feisty feminist who speaks and acts out against state actors while begging for solidarity. She does not dress demurely nor are her actions demure or modest. While Yousafzai is a known speaker and advocate for peace, Tamimi is known by her violent actions. At the Brussel’s Women’s Conference, for example, Tamimi speaks of the way that Zionism hurts all people, not just Palestinians. She names her audience members as supporters and begs them to “please … show your solidarity … it’s incumbent on everyone in the world to find the solution” (Butler, 2018).

These violent actions alongside the rhetorical shift from arguments that employ “I” to one that asks for solidarity can create dissonance for a benevolent Public. They are not sure what to make of the angry, physical, young Muslim woman not saving herself but imploring others to work with her to save all Palestinian women. Those who challenge the authority of nation-states and global institutions do not have stories circulated and told about them because their lives do not support political and economic objectives (Hong, 2011). They do not represent the authority and coherence of a nation or global order. As a result, such figures do not appear worthy of protection and, as happened with Tamimi, can be abandoned to state violence.

As the absence of details about Tamimi and the failure of her story to build a draw in a public in suggests, there are, as Kara Keeling (2009, p. 567) argues, people, stories, and experiences that are ignored because they expose state and global power. Tamimi and Yousafzai show how powers are held up through the circulation of deliberately chosen gendered figures—particularly of specifically raced and gendered third Brown-world girls. Yousafzai rises to global recognition: her story cultivates and speaks to a benevolent Public; she receives invitations to speak in prominent global governmental institutions such as the UN; and she receives prestigious global awards that recognize how her actions benefit other young women. Tamimi, on the other hand, is turned over to state violence (incarceration): her story does not circulate as widely; her speech acts do not create an intervention; and she does not become a symbol of female heroism as a response to state-sponsored, gendered violence.

Conclusion

By contrasting media representations of these two young women (who both stand up to violence), I bring into the conversation how gender and race work in tandem to shore up neoliberal political economy and a benevolent public. Yousafzai, because of her opposition to the traditional patriarchy of an Islamist group opposed by the United States, is hypervisible and heroic. Her visibility occurs only a few years before Tamimi, a girl from a colonized group who opposes a state aligned with imperial power, (literally) disappears into prisons of a nation-state aligned with the US policy. The stories about women/girls/others that do not have publics to rally behind them tell us about gendered and racialized governmental and global precarity where “some lives are protected and others are not” (Lorey, 2015, p. 18), especially lives whose citizenship, age, labor, sexuality, ability, and/or ethnicity is not valued.

My understanding is that Tamimi accepted a plea deal in March 2018, but she has now, for the most part faded from public view in the West. Her actions and speeches fail to be understood as a form of empowerment despite the fact that Tamimi has been an active and vocal rhetor—she speaks, she acts, she finds momentum where her speech and action is meaningful, and her community recognizes her. In 2014, at an international peace conference, she called out President Obama for his use of drones in warfare (as did Yousafzai in another context). Yet, Tamimi’s speech and actions fade from view when they are met with the overwhelming power of geopolitical state relations. Following Lisa Lowe (2015), I suggest that Tamimi fails to rise to global prominence, because her story is tied to interests of state power and global capital (pp. 4–5). Tamimi’s story does not shore up the political and economic objectives of the benevolent public or its neoliberal values; it cannot be used to stand for benevolent neoliberalism; in fact, Tamimi’s actions appear to only lead to incarceration. Her actions briefly enter the Western mainstream (i.e. attention from CNN and other Western news sources), and then quickly fade from view, whereas Yousafzai continues to be a recognizable figure.

But what Tamimi does do is offer a counterpublic of resistance. Her violent acts and rhetorical arguments, which draw attention to the limitations of a singular girl’s agency, have the potential to demonstrate what Fraser (1990) has called a “subaltern counterpublic”—a “parallel discursive arena where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (p. 81). Tamimi exposes structural violence and the limits of individual action through her very individual violent acts. The comparison between the gendered and raced neoliberal values that the Smart Economics PSA and the figure of Malala Yousafzai produce and the subaltern counterpublics ones that Tamimi potentially produce shows whose interests are served in the representations.

As scholars of publics, we must think of race and capital together and see how they are mutually constitutive (this is what we see when we look at Tamimi and Youzafazai)—race and gender work together to produce neoliberal political economy. In addition, as scholars of communication and publics, we need to be aware of how benevolent neoliberal publics utilize difference to create unity in the name of US exceptionalism. In addition, we must pay attention to how counterpublics work, as is done at times by individuals who expose the norms and contexts of their cultural environment and distort its practices.

To conclude, I suggest that we cannot ignore how neoliberalism in the form of pseudo-feminist benevolent publics allows for both/and construction of empowerment and in-need third-world girl subjects. We also cannot ignore the structural violence of imposed neoliberal economic policies or the seemingly benign or even progressive stories such as the girl empowerment rhetorics I explore here. Racialized representations have in the past been used to justify colonial interventions, but more recently agentive narratives of development have become central to neoliberal structural violence. These sorts of constructions of race and gender under neoliberalism risk rendering some lives less valuable and risks making some deaths more acceptable. In fact, just recently, Deputy Knesset Speaker Bezalel Smotrich wrote that Tamimi should have been shot in the knee for her actions so that she would have been under house arrest for the rest of her life. My call is to scholars of publics to look at the role of changing patterns of global neoliberal capital accumulation in driving global girl empowerment rhetorics and other new sorts of interventions.