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11 - Conclusions: Hope and False Hope in the Fight for Girls’ Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2025

Rosie Walters
Affiliation:
Cardiff University
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Summary

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– 2017

Overall, 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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