Description
This paper troubles paternalistic notions of Global South girls’ vulnerability, especially those contextualized around climate crisis, forwarded by the global non-profit, Plan International, and its Real Choices, Real Lives (RCRL) programme. Here, Global South girls (as much as global South States) remain an infantilized Other or object; not only are girls imagined as an essentialized and monolithic category defined by their Global South victimhood, but this construction also positions the Global North (and Global North organizations) as the parental actor best equipped to save and empower them from their supposedly helpless fates. As much as this paper problematizes such paternalistic vulnerability – particularly for how it obscures Global South girls’ agency and their complex experiences of climate change, as well as historical and ongoing global, colonial, and capitalist inequalities – I turn to feminist care ethics to suggest that the idea of vulnerability need not be abandoned altogether. That is, vulnerability is a necessary condition and experience of being human – and, thus, it is necessarily a condition and experience of girlhood too. Taking seriously a more encompassing and less paternalistic idea of vulnerability has significant (and potentially transformative) political implications for how girlhood is conceptualized around climate crisis – going beyond colonial constructions of girls’ essentialized victimhood - and instead prioritizing embodied experiences of climate vulnerability that help inform more ambitious climate change solutions.
