Abstract
In this first of two contextualizing chapters, I examine what Lyndsay Hayhurst dubbed the “girling of development” or the strategic emphasis on girls’ as agents of economic growth that serves as the potent rationale for Menstrual Hygiene Management. Through this lens, providing girls with access to menstrual care materials and menstrual health education is the key that unlocks girls’ potential. I trace a brief history of the girling of development trend, including the Nike Foundation’s introduction of “The Girl Effect” in 2009 followed by a discussion of feminist critiques of this approach. While centering on girls is a step forward, critics argue, the “the turn toward the girl” is often reductive, superficial, and potentially dangerous in the ways it insufficiently addresses the complicated web of factors that contribute to girls’ vulnerabilities and positions girls as economic resources.
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Notes
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In 2011, UNIFEM was folded into UN Women.
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These face-to-face fundraisers are typically employees of an agency such as Public Outreach who canvass for a number of organizations.
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I can’t resist pointing out the egregious deployment of the “other” in this moment of the video. When Ruth states, “Of course this is not my story…,” she taps into the Western assumptions about life in the Global South as starkly contrasted with those of the Global North. “Of course” as a well-groomed, white woman, ostensibly American and privileged, she has not fallen prey to the horrid chain of events she describes. I will explore this North-South bifurcation threaded through MHM discourse in Chap. 5.
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I will address this statistic’s curious ubiquity in some detail in Chap. 4.
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As development professionals know, Sachs’ view is controversial. Pointed critiques include William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (2007) and Nina Munk’s The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty (2013).
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Bobel, C. (2019). The Girling of Development. In: The Managed Body. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89414-0_2
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