Teaching the Third World Girl: Girl Rising as a precarious curriculum of empathy

This article examines the recently released Girl Rising film and associated campaign to analyze how the guarantee that girls’ education is panacea for local, national and global solutions is sedimented through affective logics. I view Girl Rising as a curriculum inclusive of the film, accompanying packaged lesson plans for educators, and related discourses and affects. The Girl Rising curriculum is part of a larger discursive development apparatus that anchors particular storylines about the relationship between girlhood, education and development as truth. I attend to textual and visual representations of empowered Third World girlhood in the Girl Rising curriculum. While empathy is often understood as a good feeling, I analyze its precarious dimensions, which are cultivated through curricular encounters between the Western spectator/learner and the Third World Girl. I ask: How is the ideal Third World Girl produced in and as curriculum? What are viewers provoked to feel as they consume her potential, and what knowledges about development do these feelings crystallize? Finally, what implications does this have on the production of Third World girlhood?