Continuum

Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

ISSN: 1030-4312 (Print) 1469-3666 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccon20

‘Confidence you can carry!’: girls in crisis and the

market for girls' empowerment organizations

Sarah Banet-Weiser

To cite this article: Sarah Banet-Weiser (2015) ‘Confidence you can carry!’: girls in crisis
and the market for girls' empowerment organizations, Continuum, 29:2, 182-193, DOI:
10.1080/10304312.2015.1022938

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1022938

Published online: 19 Mar 2015.

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Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2015
Vol. 29, No. 2, 182–193, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1022938

‘Confidence you can carry!’: girls in crisis and the market for girls’
empowerment organizations
Sarah Banet-Weiser*

University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Girl empowerment organizations (GEOs) emerged in the USA around the same time
that empowering girls became a central theme in international development discourse.
I argue that these organizations are part of a ‘market of empowerment’ that aims to
empower girls within a context of commodified girl power and neoliberal
entrepreneurialism.

In September 2013, New York City (NYC) unveiled a new public health drive targeted
at girls ages 7 –12 years. The programme, called the NYC Girls Program, was funded
by then Mayor Michael Bloomberg (US$330,000) and includes an after-school
programme, physical fitness classes and a Twitter campaign, #ImAGirl (Hartocollis
2013). The campaign is aimed at ‘improving girls’ self-esteem and body image,’ and
features a diverse array of ordinary kids with the tagline: ‘I’m Beautiful the Way I Am.’
The programme has wide distribution, with advertisements on subways and bus stations,
and a 30 second video posted on YouTube, the campaign’s website and played in city
taxis.
The NYC Girls Program is part of an exponential rise in the past 15 years in girl
empowerment organizations (GEOs) in the USA, which are variously corporate, nonprofit,
and state-funded. US-based GEOs emerged at around the same time that empowering girls
became a central theme in international development discourse; in the mid 2000s, the Nike
Foundation coined the term the ‘Girl Effect’ in partnership with the United Nations and the
World Health Organization to demonstrate the significance of empowering girls in a
global economy (Koffman and Gill 2013). Girls have been highlighted by development
organizations as ‘the powerful and privileged agents of social change, indeed even as
solutions to the global crisis and world poverty,’ (Shain 2013) leading to what Koffman
and Gill call the ‘girl-powering of development.’
In the following text, I examine these recent efforts to empower girls through
organizations within a context of commodified girl power and neoliberal entrepreneuri-
alism, where the focus is often on girls as productive ‘economic subjects.’ (McRobbie
2009). Additionally, I argue that GEOs emerge in force in the twenty-first century in part
because girls are seen as ‘in crisis’ in the contemporary moment, a crisis that finds
purchase in education, policy, personal self-esteem and what is being coined a gendered
‘confidence gap’ (Hains 2012; Kay and Shipman 2014). These interrelated contexts of
commodified girl power, neoliberal entrepreneurialism and girls’ crisis create what I call a
market for empowerment, where empowerment itself becomes a commodity. GEOs
provide market logic for commodified empowerment, and target an imagined feminine
subject who is both in crisis and a powerful consumer.

*Email: sbanet@usc.edu

q 2015 Taylor & Francis

 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 183

Girls in crisis/girls as consumers

Hains (2012) has argued that the 1990s witnessed the emergence of a particular ‘crisis in
girls.’ This ‘crisis’ was ostensibly manifested in girls’ exclusion from school math and
science programmes, rising numbers of white, middle-class girls with eating disorders
and body-image issues, and reports of general low self-confidence emerging from media
representations of hyper-sexuality. Dobson argues that current ‘Protectionist/moralist
discourses have invoked fear about the damaging effects of cultural “sexualisation” on
girls in particular and have tended to associate any forms of so-called “self-
sexualisation” with pathology and “low self esteem” for girls.’ (2014, 99; see also Banet-
Weiser 2014) This new crisis was also detailed in significant US research reports about
inequities for girls, including the influential 1991 American Association of University
Women’s Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America, which focused on girls’ low
self-esteem and confidence, and connected this to the low success in science and math
for girls in school (Hains 2012). This report, as well as subsequent others, stimulated a
national conversation and response, including renewed efforts to encourage girls to
enter science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, educational programmes
focusing on body image and bullying practices at schools, and changes in public
policy to include girls as valuable citizens (Hasinoff 2012; Hains 2012; Projansky 2014,
among others).
Alongside this crisis, since the 1990s girls have concurrently been identified as a
powerful consumer demographic and are targeted relentlessly in advertising, branding and
popular culture (Projansky 2014; Hains 2012; Banet-Weiser 2007). The slogan of ‘girl
power,’ attached to clothing, sports and young adult literature (among other things), is not
simply a commodity object, but also refers to girls as powerful consumers, representing
primary markets (where girls have their own income); a market of influencers (where girls
influence their parents’ consumer choices) and a future market (where girls’ consumer
loyalty is cultivated as future customers) (McNeal 1992; Banet-Weiser 2007).
The positioning of girls as ‘in crisis’ and in need of empowerment and, simultaneously,
as important consumers, has helped to create a market for empowerment. As girls have
been increasingly recognized as an important consumer demographic, the power in ‘girl
power’ has become an increasingly malleable concept, lending itself to commodification
and marketization. In this sense, GEOs and their emphasis on building individual feminine
leadership skills, self-confidence and healthy self-esteem tap into contemporary neoliberal
politics. The context in which these organizations emerge is part of a ‘neoliberal feminist’
landscape where GEOs – structured on market logic – focus on the individualizing of
social issues and commodifying social activism through brand culture (Rottenberg 2014;
Banet-Weiser 2012, 2014). As Rottenberg demonstrates, this neoliberal feminism
encourages a feminist subject who is aware of gender inequality, but whose ‘feminism is
so individuated that it has been completely unmoored from any notion of social inequality
and consequently cannot offer any sustained analytic of the structures of male dominance,
power, or privilege’ (2014, 424– 425, emphasis in original). There are varied and
contradictory discourses and practices of contemporary femininity that lend themselves to
marketization in a context where markets have expanded beyond conventional economic
formations to encompass emotional or personal markets, where such things as self-esteem
and empowerment can be branded and sold (Banet-Weiser 2012, 2014). What these
branding strategies accomplish, in part, is the transformation of emotions and social
relations into products, around which industries can be built. It is this concept of marketing
empowerment that is my focus here, where I ask the questions: What happens when female
184 S. Banet-Weiser

empowerment is understood through market logics? How is the concept of female

empowerment mobilized and marketed?

Marketing empowerment through girl empowerment organizations

In the USA, hundreds of organizations whose goal is to empower girls have been founded
since 1990, with a majority founded in 1995 and beyond.1 Though the source of
empowerment varies within organizations – some, such as SPARK (Sexualization Protest:
Action, Resistance, Knowledge), aim to empower girls to challenge hyper-sexualization in
the media; others, such as the Confidence Coalition, see empowerment emanating from
self-confidence; and yet others, such as the development-oriented Africaid, aim to
empower girls through education – their definition of empowerment generally denotes a
transference of power, a flow from the powerful to the disempowered, here recognized as
girls. In the following text, I examine the marketing of empowerment through a discursive
analysis of the websites, mission statements and public campaigns of over 100 GEOs, and
I identify key representations, themes and discourses that constitute a broad definition of
‘empowerment’ for these organizations. For some organizations, such as SPARK and the
Confidence Coalition, empowerment involves girls’ own subjectivities with a focus on
coaching girls to be confident leaders with high self-esteem. For NGOs such as Africaid,
the definition of empowerment targets donors rather than imagined subjects, positioning
girls (especially in the global South) as victims of poverty and poor education, but as
potential, important ‘human capital investments’ (Switzer 2013). Other organizations
focus on educating girls in particular skills including media/filmmaking, writing and
STEM fields. To further articulate how this multi-dimensional definition of empowerment
constitutes a market for empowerment, I examine two GEOs that focus on confidence,
leadership and body-image: SPARK and the Confidence Coalition; and one GEO that
focuses on global poverty, Africaid.
To clarify, I am not making an argument about the girls ostensibly targeted by these
organizations. I am arguing, however, that many of these organizations centre around an
imagined subject/implied consumer: an entrepreneurial female subject who emerges from
‘neoliberal feminism,’ and ‘who is constantly turned inward, monitoring herself’
(Rottenberg 2014, 429). Additionally, this imagined subject is typically positioned as
either what Harris calls a Can Do or At Risk girl; Can Do girls are confident entrepreneurs
and leaders, and are often white and middle-class girls, whereas At Risk girls lack
resources, are subject to poverty, and are often girls of colour and working class girls
(Harris 2004).

The confidence gap: the Confidence Coalition and SPARK

The Confidence Coalition was founded by the Kappa Delta sorority, and professes
dedication to the ‘confidence movement’ that intends to build ‘confidence in girls so that
they can feel better about themselves, stand up to peer pressure, challenge media
stereotypes and bullying behavior, and end abusive relationships’ (Confidence Coalition
website). While certainly these are admirable goals, this organization (comprising a
coalition of individuals, NGOs, and companies) relies on conventional feminine routines,
activities and identities as activist practices. Perhaps most importantly, the Confidence
Coalition focuses on the individual girl as a change agent, thus putting the burden of
confidence on her body, rather than addressing the structural and infrastructural
mechanisms that operate to diminish girls’ confidence (for more on this in terms of adult
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 185

women, see Douglas 2010). Thus, the girl’s body remains the key site for conversations
around hyper-sexualization and health, but also, and importantly, for confidence, self-
realization and self-esteem; the girl’s body is simultaneously the problem and the
resolution.
Of course, confidence, self-esteem and leadership are important elements of
subjectivity, especially for girls and women who have been traditionally socialized as
submissive, insecure and subordinate. I am not challenging this, but I am suggesting that
these individual aspects of empowerment lend themselves to commodification. For
example, one form of activism promoted by the Confidence Coalition is the ‘Go
Confidently’ handbag collection. In this campaign, coalition members donate handbags,
which are then distributed to girls who might not otherwise afford them. As the campaign
states, ‘a new handbag can help any woman walk more confidently. Think about how you
walk a little taller with a new bag on your shoulder – it’s confidence you can carry!’ The
lack of monetary exchange distinguishes this campaign from conventional commodity
consumption. Nevertheless, this campaign challenges little about traditional femininity as
defined through an attention to fashion, accessories and the body. Moreover, this campaign
squarely situates confidence as a commodity – something ‘you can carry!’ – thereby
fashioning empowerment into something individual, self-actualizing and part of an
industry, and obfuscating the way that institutionalized gender politics denies power to
girls and women.
Tincknell, discussing television makeover shows, argues that this genre has ‘helped
renew the hegemony of beauty culture as the apex of femininity at a historical juncture
when women (in parts of Western society at least) are ostensibly more economically
independent, socially engaged and politically visible than ever before’ (2011, 83). This
same dynamic is at play through the work of the Confidence Coalition, as girls and young
women are advised to derive confidence through their bodies – precisely at a moment
when girls are becoming more economically and politically independent despite the
cultural and social focus on their bodies.
Inserting ‘empowerment’ into industry, or using it as currency in a kind of market, is
not simply marketing spin. There are real stakes in understanding visibility as
empowerment. The commodification of empowerment through visibility reifies
empowerment, justifying it as an end in itself rather than as a starting point for material
change and feminist social justice. For example, the Confidence Coalition also sponsors a
Twitter campaign, #YouCan, where members send girls and women inspirational
messages about what they ‘can do.’ While there is nothing wrong with an inspirational
message, both this and the ‘Go Confidently’ campaigns validate an individual
consumerism (‘you can’) for both recipients of the philanthropy and assume an
entrepreneurial, activist individual, who can afford feminine accessories and is media
savvy.
The Confidence Coalition also has an online magazine, Justine, which claims to carry a
‘message of empowerment.’ The magazine looks almost identical to other teen fashion
magazines, such as Teen Cosmo or Teen Vogue, who have similarly tapped into a post-
feminist sensibility that stresses individual empowerment as a goal for girls. Additionally,
girls are asked to take a ‘Confidence pledge’ by the Confidence Coalition, which begins
with the simple ‘Today, I pledge to be confident.’ This positions ‘confidence’ as a choice
and commodity – girls just need to buy, and to buy into, confidence, and then apparently it
will happen.
Within the context of the Confidence Coalition, we witness a newly imagined
entrepreneur, not defined in the traditional sense of being a business owner or investor, but
186 S. Banet-Weiser

rather, an entrepreneur of the self (Rose 1999; Foucault 1991; Hearn 2008). For the
Confidence Coalition, this notion of the entrepreneur of the self takes hold in a focus on
individual self-work; empowerment here often means building confidence, becoming a
leader and recognizing one’s own beauty. The various activities endorsed by the
Confidence Coalition are typically undertaken individually; success – measured in terms
of self-confidence – is also an individual accomplishment. The problem with this kind of
commodification is that consumption of ‘empowerment,’ understood and expressed within
a post-feminist sensibility and a context of capitalist marketability, becomes a practice that
absorbs – rather than energizes or mobilizes – political sensibility.
There are, however, GEOs such as SPARK that more explicitly embrace political or
feminist sensibilities. Yet, even with this more explicit feminist context, they nonetheless
circulate and gain traction in an economy of visibility and neoliberal feminism, where
collective politics are subsumed by a focus on the individual.

SPARK
The SPARK organization began as a response to an influential 2007 report by the
American Psychological Association’s Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. Part of
this report called for grassroots mobilizing around the assumed danger that sexualization
poses for girls, and recommended responses such as producing zines (Web-based
magazines) or blogs, and encouraging girls to become activists (SPARK website). The
organization started as a summit with well-known US feminist psychologists Lyn Mikel
Brown and Carol Gilligan at the helm; it has since become an organization training girls to
fight sexualization through media activism.
For many organizations, such as the Confidence Coalition, empowerment is defined in
economic or personal terms such as confidence and self-esteem, in the faith that these
qualities lead to success in the business world. In contrast, SPARK has an explicitly
feminist foundation. The stated goal of the organization is to encourage collective feminist
activism for girls. For example, SPARK’s 2012 Change.org petition against the use of
photoshopped models in Seventeen Magazine was widely covered in mainstream news
including the New York Times and the Washington Post, and was a lead story in the US
national news broadcast Nightline. Convincing a national mass magazine to halt the
normalized practice of photo-shopping in an effort to challenge unrealistic and idealized
representations of female beauty is an impressive accomplishment, and one that should be
lauded.
Yet, as the organization’s founders openly acknowledge, the mobilization and
circulation of SPARK activism in dominant media entails transforming the collective into
individual action, which is more easily commodified. The current discourse of
empowerment encourages girls to work on themselves as an individual project, validating
the coupling of empowerment to girls’ bodies, rather than to a feminist goal that addresses
structural gender discrimination. SPARK’s Seventeen Magazine campaign is clearly
meant to highlight the ways in which idealized standards of female beauty exclude most
women and is an important message. But the focus on beauty also instantiates that girls’
power is located in their physicality, in their bodies; as such, this focus also emphasizes
that girls’ power is located in that which is visible.
SPARK is aware of the ways that a specific definition of empowerment has been
commodified and made visible. The national media coverage of the Seventeen Magazine
campaign presented it as the narrative of a brave, individual 14-year-old white girl, Julia
Bluhm, who spearheaded the petition and prevailed against all odds to convince a
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 187

behemoth publishing company to change their routine practices. The role SPARK, as a
coalition and organization, played in this story was rarely mentioned. As Edell, Brown,
and Tolman (founders of SPARK) commented,
Julia and her teammates came to understand that it was not insignificant that this global media
revolution was attributed to a thin, White, soft-spoken, articulate, middle-class girl from a
small town in Maine. In protesting the sexualising, ‘perfection’-inducing digital wand of
Photoshop, Julia’s body was turned into a safe canvas upon which to project our desires for
‘Everygirl’ – a squeaky clean ‘average’ girl whose desire for her friends in ballet class not to
stress about their weight seemed empathic and sweet, fitting into accepted norms of
femininity. (Edell et al., 2013, 280)
The feminist goals of SPARK are legible only when articulated through the ‘safe
canvas’ of an individual, Can Do girl. Tolman points out that portraying SPARK’s
campaign more accurately as a collective action of girls based in defiance and anger is
‘dangerous’ as it emphasizes collectivity and overt feminist politics, which are not easily
subsumed into the current brand of neoliberal feminism (Tolman 2012; Rottenberg 2014,
419). Alternatively, the story of a lone hero working to change the establishment is
precisely the kind of narrative that validates the newly empowered girl as a marketable
subject and normalizes the individual entrepreneur within the market for empowerment.
Accordingly, SPARK positions itself within cultural and social discourse as advocating
the ‘right’ kind of activism, one that normalizes a post-feminist neoliberal female subject.
That is, while SPARK may be self-reflexive about the way the media individualizes its
politics, the organization is nonetheless part of a particular economy of visibility. When
this economy restructures the political goals of SPARK as a neoliberal individual project,
those broader political and structural goals are rendered less important. Thus, media
narratives that circulate within an economy of visibility erase SPARK’s more overtly
feminist goals of girls working collectively to protest systemic discrimination by
transforming these goals into an individual narrative.
Ironically, SPARK is responding to the contemporary neoliberal context for girls, a
context that produces anxiety through constant surveillance, encourages self-realization
and self-governance, and creates a precarious labour environment where the individual
entrepreneur is the key subject (Walkerdine 2009; McRobbie 2009; Gill 2007). Many GEOs
then help to provide the services previously provided by the state (education primarily, or
federally funded after school programmes). For instance, SPARK offers curriculum on their
website that offers ways for girls to question sexualization in the media, as well as
instructions on how to run an after-school or summer programme for girls. However,
because of the market logic in which these organizations are embedded, what they
emphasize are precisely the characteristics that validate new gendered neoliberal
subjectivities in the first place: individual self-esteem, leadership and empowerment. The
logic of many GEOs emphasizes individualism over collective well-being; where ‘a new
regime of morality comes into being, one that links moral probity even more intimately to
self-reliance and efficiency, as well as to the individual’s capacity to exercise his or her own
autonomous choices.’ (Rottenberg 2014, 421) This reinforces not only the idea that girls are
vulnerable, but also that empowerment is an individual achievement rather than something
that should be worked for on a structural, or feminist, level.

Girls at risk: Africaid

Alongside organizations that hope to empower girls through confidence and self-esteem, a
number of nonprofit organizations have emerged to provide resources for girls who are
188 S. Banet-Weiser

seen as victims of poverty and poor education, especially in the Global South.
In conjunction with development discourse that highlights the aforementioned ‘Girl
Effect’ as the key to contemporary social and economic change, girls living with the local
manifestations of global poverty are seen to be particularly worthy of investment.2
Consider, for example, the GEO Africaid. Africaid’s tag line is ‘Reach Teach
Empower,’ and their mission statement states their dedication to supporting ‘girls’
education in Africa in order to provide young women with the opportunity to transform
their own lives and the futures of their communities’ (Africaid website). Indeed, one
Africaid-sponsored event explicitly references the ‘Girl Effect:’ a poster advertising this
event in Denver, Colorado featuring an ‘African Buffet, Live African Music, Tanzanian
Crafts, and a Silent Auction’ contains the banner headline: ‘Be Part of the Girl Effect with
Muziki for Africaid!’ The primary output of the organization is educational scholarships,
with the specific aim ‘to empower African girls to be leaders.’ The organization’s website
follows a conventional humanitarian and imperialist aesthetic, with pictures and videos of
smiling young African girls at school and at play.
But it is not only a humanitarian and imperialist narrative that is embodied by GEOs
such as Africaid. The narrative focus of GEOs such as SPARK and the Confidence
Coalition on confidence, self-esteem, and body image is the same narrative that mobilizes
GEOs that focus on girls who lack resources and are victims of poverty. The Girl Effect,
that is, relies on the contrast between girls’ powerlessness and their exceptional capacity
(Koffman and Gill 2013). Within this frame, the Girl Effect, and the GEOs that mobilize
this discourse, position girls, especially those in the global South, as not only the key to
international development but also the perfect embodiment of a neoliberal subject. Thus,
girls in the global South are seen as potential neoliberal subjects, hindered by poverty and
patriarchy; in fact, it is precisely obstacles such as poverty that makes girls in the global
South quintessential neoliberal subjects. Koffman and Gill point out that development
initiatives such as the Girl Effect portray girls as ‘already entrepreneurial’ because they
have had to be resourceful: ‘Poverty, it seems, can be celebrated for the entrepreneurial
capacities it stimulates’ (2013, 90). The ‘empowerment’ message of Africaid reads
differently than SPARK or Confidence Coalition, and the economic context is vastly
different (where Confidence Coalition targets middle-class American girls and Africaid
focuses on girls living in global poverty) but Africaid nonetheless taps into a market of
neoliberal empowerment (not to mention an imperialist history). The Girl Effect continues
a focus on women in development within neoliberalism; as Inderpal Grewal points out
about human rights discourse in the later twentieth century:
“Women” outside the West, in human rights discourses, were represented as objects of charity
and care by the West but could become subjects who could participate in the global economy
and become global citizens; this was the “third-world” victim who had become a global
subject. (Grewal 2005, 130)
There is a paradox here: nonprofit organizations aiming to eradicate global poverty are
also built upon the marketability of the ‘girl crisis.’ Or, at least, GEOs dedicated to
eradicating global poverty understand and capitalize on the ways in which the girl crisis
encourages the profitability of empowerment in the current economy. The organizations
created to support and validate the empowered, imagined subject, certainly can be seen as
a ‘value-add’ in the marketability of empowerment. In a similar way, the GEOs that focus
on girls who are disenfranchised because of poverty or a lack of education are organized
around market logics. An investment in girls as agents of social change is warranted
insofar as the return on investment is financial growth (Grewal 2005; Switzer 2013).
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 189

The goals of Africaid, though important, are conventional for many nonprofit
organizations; the organization, like many others, adopts a UNICEF doctrine where
individual girls are ‘sponsored’ for a small amount of money per day. The website includes
a merchandise page, where products handmade by girls are sold, with profits going to girls’
education. In this way, Africaid follows the pattern of many other Western humanitarian
organizations, where visual and material artifacts are sold with the ‘intent of bringing
distant, “real” human suffering closer to the American public-as-donor – just close
enough so that one could possess the image, as evidence of their philanthropic
contribution’ (Brough 2012, 178). In the case of Africaid, the beneficiaries of philanthropy
are girls living in global poverty, and as such, the girls who are the recipients of the
‘empowerment’ the organization promises are ‘constructed to carry moral and emotional
meanings to gain the “sympathy-worthiness” that may result in some form of social
change.’ (Fujiwara, quoted in Brough, 179). As Heather Switzer points out, this belies
significant differences in the discursive focus of confidence-based versus poverty-based
GEOs:
Popular and scholarly panics are less about girls being “too sexy too soon” or commodified by
consumer culture (as they are in the global north) and more about girls being “too reproductive
too soon” and not commodified enough, insofar as their labour is unproductive and illegible to
the state and their consumptive patterns are stalled at subsistence. (2013, 349)
But these discourses are not oppositional. Instead, they centre the girl within a market,
where they are perceived as ‘human capital investments,’ and as such ‘require expert
management, regulation, and routine intervention’ (Switzer 2013, 349).
Neoliberal capitalism, and the normalization of the brand and lifestyle of ‘girl power,’
enables organizations like SPARK and the Confidence Coalition, as much as Africaid.
Both types of organizations follow an entrepreneurial business model that is encouraged
and realized by neoliberal capitalist practices, and both establish girls as an investment
upon which these organizations thrive, and where ‘empowerment becomes a function of
rational exchange’ (Switzer 2013, 350). It is crucial to attend to the discourses and
practices that provide the logic for GEOs, as they validate the business logic of neoliberal
entrepreneurialism and thus have political ramifications for girls’ subjectivities. Within
the market of empowerment, GEOs work to build financial profiles where girls are ‘human
capital investments,’ and validate their position as a kind of resolution to financial crisis
(Switzer 2013, 350). Those organizations that utilize the Girl Effect, like other groups such
as SPARK and Confidence Coalition, are aimed at ‘donors and investors, to see the
potential of girls and invest in them’ (Shain 2013).

Smarter economics? Rethinking empowerment

Projansky writes that the
media incessantly look at and invite us to look at girls. Girls are objects at which we gaze,
whether we want to or not. They are everywhere in our mediascapes. As such, media turn girls
into spectacles – visual objects on display. (2014, 5)
Girls are represented in myriad ways in an economy of media visibility, where they have
become producers of media as well as visible within media platforms. Yet, the fact that
more girls are media producers goes hand-in-hand with the fact that more girls are the
subject of the media’s attention, through the relentless spotlight of media visibility. For
many girls, media visibility, the increasing imperative to ‘put yourself out there,’ or to
enact what Amy Dobson has called ‘shameless performativity,’ is part of a broader context
of neoliberal entrepreneurialism, where self-branding is becoming normative as identity
190 S. Banet-Weiser

construction (Dobson 2014; Rose 1999; Hearn 2008; Gill 2007; McRobbie 2009;
Projansky 2014; Banet-Weiser 2012).
To be clear, media visibility does represent a form of power – after all, media activist
organizations representing women, people of colour, and gays and lesbians, have
advocated for years for a kind of recognition through representation. Indeed, the
recognition of girls is the main point of GEOs such as SPARK, the Confidence Coalition
and Africaid. But media visibility is not, as scholars such as Herman Gray (2013) and
Angela McRobbie (2009) have pointed out, a guaranteed access to power. Rather, because
media visibility often presumes equality to be latent in the fact of representation, rather
than struggles for it as a practice, visibility can obscure other ways in which marginalized
constituencies are disempowered, through political and legal rights, defunding of public
education, increased incarceration and so on (Gray 2013). In the current post-Civil Rights,
post-feminist landscape, where arguably the West has become what economist Sandel
calls a more encompassing ‘market society’ rather than a ‘market economy,’ visibility
becomes an end in itself, a commodified form that supports a market for empowerment.
In the current moment, we witness the continued reach of the market into areas of life that
previously were not marketable, and female empowerment is part of this practice (Sandel
2012).
The word ‘empowerment’ is itself a buzzword conceptualized as a market, and many
GEOs are (in part) the producers of this market. The malleability and commodification of
the concept of empowerment potentially empties it of political valence. The current
‘crisis in girls’ and the need for confidence achieved momentum within the specific
political economy of neoliberal capitalism, as evidenced by GEOs such as SPARK and
the Confidence Coalition. In fact, the crisis exists as a crisis precisely because there
quickly emerged a market for dealing with its needs – which is a key component of the
dynamics of neoliberal capitalism. And, as often occurs when markets emerge, the ‘crisis
in girls’ is transformed into a brand, a logo or slogan attached to research reports, self-
help books and educational programmes – ‘confidence you can carry!’ In the past few
decades, the ‘crisis in girls’ also became subject to branding logics and practices,
especially as it increasingly focused on individual girls and their low self-esteem and
confidence.
The market for empowerment that GEOs both create and perpetuate is not merely a
metaphorical market; rather, girls are identified as key players in an international market,
so that the empowerment created and perpetuated by GEOs is specifically, as Shain (2013)
points out, ‘economic empowerment.’ Yet economic empowerment in a neoliberal
capitalist context means, among other things, that the individual girl is highlighted as a
potential entrepreneur. As a consequence, young women are encouraged to eschew
collective feminist politics and coalition as a route to political change and focus instead on
themselves as individual, empowered entrepreneurs. As McRobbie has pointed out in this
regard,
Young women are a good investment, they can be trusted with micro-credit, they are the
privileged subjects of social change. But the terms of these great expectations on the part of
governments are that young women must do without more autonomous feminist politics.
What is consistent is the displacement of feminism as a political movement. (2009, 15)
The success of individual women within neoliberalism, then, becomes evidence of
empowerment, where empowerment is constructed as a market. The rights that are made
visible in the name of ‘empowerment’ are often those that lend themselves to media
visibility and ‘smarter economics,’ not feminist politics. Despite the focus on gender
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 191

inequality of GEOs, then, because the logic of many of these organizations is a neoliberal,
market-based logic, the empowerment that is hoped for is necessarily an individual, not a
structural or collective, empowerment.
This is a landscape muddied with contradictions, making it rather logical for a slew of
GEOs, all with slightly differentiated missions but a similar focus on the ‘girl crisis’ and
on girls as potential economic subjects, to have something to seize on. It should be clear
that I am not critiquing the political investments or practices of all GEOs, but rather I argue
that their emergence makes sense within a particular historical moment. Importantly, this
moment is one of neoliberal capitalism and new labour markets, one in which class
identities are seen to have disappeared, leaving in their wake the independent,
entrepreneurial subject. As Walkerdine points out, this shift is reflected in the demands of
these new labour markets, which are demands for upward mobility, regulated by new
techniques of self-care and self-governance. As Walkerdine argues,
the movement from practices of policing and external regulation to technologies of self-
regulation in which subjects come to understand themselves as responsible for their own
regulation and the management of themselves is understood as central to a neo-liberal project
in which class differences are taken to have melted away. (2009, 239)
GEOs are one such mode of self-regulation, offering girls ‘tools’ to empower themselves
as confident leaders. While this goal is important, it also helps to create a market for
empowerment with girls as consumers and commodities, rather than challenging the social
and economic structures that disempower girls in the first place.

Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge Inna Arzumanova, Melissa Brough, Josh Kun and Sarah Shrank for
their feedback on this essay. In particular, I would like to thank Tisha Dejmanee for all her work and
commitment to this project.

Notes
1. I examined the websites and other media productions of 118 organizations, from a variety of
sources: SPARK Movement, Confidence Coalition, Amazing Women Rock, Idealist.org,
World Association for NGOs (WANGO), and the Girls’ education links through the World
Bank. The organizations I analysed are primarily North American, and are those that have a
web presence (many organizations in Africa do not have a web presence). For the large NGO
databases, the word ‘girl’ was used as a search term, so if there are girl-centered organizations
that do not use ‘girl’ they were less likely to be included. I am grateful to Tisha Dejmanee for
this research.
2. Girls of colour in the USA occupy a different position as ‘at risk,’ as they are often seen as
always already at risk, especially given the social, political and cultural histories of
institutionalized racism in the USA. However, it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss this
aspect here.

Notes on contributor
Sarah Banet-Weiser is Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the
University of Southern California, and is the author of The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty
Pageants and National Identity; Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship; and
Authentice: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture. She is the co-editor of Cable
Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting, and Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in
Neoliberal Times.
192 S. Banet-Weiser

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