Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2025
Hopefully it’ll take off more
Hopefully they’ll get bigger
What we hoped to do with that was
Give some hope or just sharing contrasting ideas
Hopefully get them to join
It makes me hopeful that the club is gonna live on
It made me hopeful too
Hopefully it’ll grow
The older girls give me hope that I can do it
To have hope that we can do it
To have hope that we can make it
Hopefully I think we could persuade them
Hopefully somebody’ll support them
Hopefully people will be more inspired
Hopefully it’ll be bigger
Hopefully it should keep getting better
If we get enough interest hopefully
We can spread it to other schools hopefully.
Hopeful statements, UK, US and Malawi, 2016– 2017Overall, the findings presented in this book paint a nuanced picture in which girls negotiate the Girl Up discourse, adapting it to their local contexts and to the forms of activism in which they want to engage. Some aspects they embrace enthusiastically, others they reflect on more critically, while never fully adopting a dominant or an oppositional reading of the campaign. The Girl Up discourse itself, I have argued, reproduces neoliberal, postfeminist discourses of opportunity and choice that position girls as individually responsiblefor themselves and for their wider societies. In Girl Up, girls in the Global South are positioned as worthy of investment not because of their rights, but rather because of what they can achieve for their communities in terms of eliminating poverty.
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