While in the Girl Up leadership summit, there was evidence of more progressive and collective forms of feminism than has historically been promoted by the campaign, none of the girls openly criticized the campaign or its representations, which is unsurprising for an event hosted and broadcast globally by the campaign itself. However, in my focus groups with Girl Up club members in their schools, in a small and private group setting, the girls and I were able to have fascinating discussions about the campaign and its marketing materials. It soon became apparent that they interpreted the campaign in new and interesting ways, which rarely mapped directly onto the dominant discourses identified in the preceding chapters, or indeed the scholarly literature on girl power discourses in development. They sometimes embraced girl power discourses and at other times openly rejected their representation of what it means to be a girl.

As discussed in Chapter 1, in analysing the girls’ responses to the Girl Up materials, I draw on the work of Stuart Hall, particularly the three positions Hall identifies from which ‘decodings’ of a text may take place: dominant, negotiated and oppositional (1980: 136– 138). Further, I also draw on the work of feminist audience reception scholars, analysing how women negotiate texts with agency and creativity, despite the dominance of certain representations and discourses (Parameswaran, 2003; Radway, 2008). As Ien Ang argues, audiences’ readings of a media text are rarely either dominant or oppositional, but more often a complex interplay of different interpretations and subject positions (Ang, 2006b: 555– 556; Ang, 2012: 149).