Postures of Empowerment: Cultivating Aspirant Feminism in a Ugandan NGO

Abstract

The Kampala Programme for Empowering Girls, a Ugandan NGO, is part of a much larger transnational movement that aims to psychologically, economically, and politically empower adolescent girls around the world. Global girls’ empowerment advocates draw from the convergence of two lines of research: long‐standing demographic studies that correlate girls’ schooling with fewer and healthier pregnancies and western developmental psychology's concern with the adolescent girl's presumed crisis of self‐esteem. Yet, as anthropologists have long shown, the ways people grow up are culturally and historically specific. In order to “empower” young women in urban Uganda, the internationally educated, elite women running the NGO had to persuade their participants to articulate low self‐esteem, even as these young women claimed complete confidence. To do so, elite NGO officers entwined explicit feminist pedagogy with tastes for foreign foods, fashion, and travel, cultivating what I call “aspirant feminism”—a desire for membership in the transnational feminist movement because it offers pathways to social mobility that are both desirable and difficult to obtain for young Ugandan women. Paradoxically, the workshop became both the grounds for developing new aspirational capacities as well as an arena for the reproduction of class difference.

“How to Live a Good Life”

“…On the ground, globalized female empowerment discourse traps adolescent girls in endless contradictions, through trainings that come in diff erent shapes and forms. Taken together with studies on empowerment trainings for upwardly mobile Ugandan girls (Bocast 2019;Moore 2016), our fi ndings highlight the clash between ideals of empowered girls, and the lack of reallife opportunities for education and future employment. At fi rst glance, Erin Moore's research with a transnational feminist NGO looks at a very diff erent demographic of girls and NGO workers: unlike the destitute refugees in this article, Moore's protagonists are middle-class Ugandan girls, to whom upper-middle-class NGO workers fl ash their private cars and cosmo-"How to Live a Good Life" ◾ 47 politan lifestyle.…”

“…Since the 1980s, Uganda has become the international community's posterchild for women's and girls' rights (Cheney 2007;Tamale 1999). Makerere University's School of Women and Gender Studies, founded in 1991 by women's rights activists, was the fi rst of its kind in Africa (Moore 2016). National legislation, including the 1990 Penal Code Act, which sets the minimal age for consensual sex with a person under the age of 18, and the introduction of Universal Primary Education in 1997, have sought to increase girls' access to education and protect them from early motherhood.…”

Capitalizing Community: Waste, Wealth, and (Im)material Labor in Kampala

“…12 Likewise, girls' empowerment programs in Kampala entail intense immaterial labor of self-narration and self-presentation that goes into crafting moral subjects both in need and worthy of NGO support. 13 These pre-established narratives consolidate African women's place in the development industry, redoubling racial hierarchies positioning Africans as essentially needy aid recipients such that even aid professionals labor not as experts, but as bodies authenticating NGOs' ties to grassroots communities. Similarly, in order to remain eligible for donor support, workers at a Ugandan orphanage simultaneously perform a specific Ganda 14 ethics of care, gifting, and interdependence while translating these into practices legible to international monitoring and evaluation regimes that produce transparency and accountability.…”

Bala wāsṭa: aspirant professionals, class‐making, and moral narratives of social mobility in Lebanon

“…This article specifically focuses on empowerment NGOs. The ‘inherently unstable category of NGO’ (Lewis & Schuller 2017: 634) emerged globally as a central site for disseminating neoliberal discourses of empowerment that promoted self‐responsibility and normalized the dissolution of welfare state structures (Hemment 2007; Moore 2016; Sharma 2008). Youth empowerment was a pro‐market rhetoric that perpetuated the interests of business and political elites by ‘quieting’ dissent against global capitalism and ‘re‐building consensus’ for it (Sukarieh & Tannock 2008: 308).…”