My dissertation It is Bleeding: Unstitching Third World Girls + Education, A Refusal of the Neoliberal Politics of Western Development Aid, and the Capitalist Desires of Schooling, is a study that examines the multiple, overlapping, and uneven relationships between schooling, international development, and third world girls by means of an analysis of the asymmetries of power that shape these uneven relationships. I posit that the dominating commonsense about third world girls is their presumed need for schooling to save them from archaic cultural practices that render them trapped in cycles of self-induced vulnerabilities. This commonsense then relies on post-feminist notions of girls’ empowerment via the promise of schooling as a route to empower girls to remedy their own vulnerabilities. However, my work intervenes to disrupt the presumptive “culture of poverty” residue that invoke the post-feminist promises of a schooled third world girl as an empowered girl. I further examine the socio-historical contexts of schooling to trouble it as a one-size-fits-all guarantee to empowerment. By interrogating the conceptualization of schooling, I aim to make visible how it is rooted in Western, colonial ideologies. The disruption this project makes is to refuse the idea that the vulnerabilities experienced by third world girls are a result of their own choices or lack of choices to turn attention more adequately to the historical, temporal, global, and geopolitical phenomenon that impact the material realities faced by third world girls. As the title suggests, my intellectual and methodological commitments are to unravel, un-suture, untangle, unknot, and ultimately unstitch third world girls from the neoliberal fantasies of schooling as the lifeline to save her. ‘What exactly is the girl being saved from?’ functions as a guiding question for this work that seeks to add to the existing body of literature in which a host of scholars have interrogated the visual representations of third world girls in what I suggest is the emerging field of Critical Third World Girlhood Studies.

In addition, I turn attention to the paradoxical portrayals of the third world girl that are shaped by overlapping contradictory representations: the girl as the answer, the girl as the problem, the girl as a victim, the girl as the object of seductive Western philanthropic desire. I suggest that this speculative making and rearranging of the third world girl is actually a form of terror that makes and unmakes the third world girl as a body without organs to be acted upon without her own consent. I further bring attention to the actors and stakeholders who construct the third world girl as a mutable subject within neoliberal regimes of governance. Overall, the intellectual merit of my dissertation work lies in its potential to disrupt the hegemony of what I outline as ‘the third world girl imaginary,’ and its ability to imagine beyond schools as neutral sites of knowledge-production and rescue. I trace the production of third world girlhoods in such campaigns to make visible the pipeline of school to empowerment to a unit of development. I identify how the campaigns almost always portray third world girls as outside of modernity yet capable of rehabilitation through the mechanics of schooling. This hegemonic way of reading girls maps dangerous capitalist, geopolitical, and neoliberal desires on the bodies of poor, racialized girls while ignoring the historical conditions that have created the subject position of those same girls. I suggest that it is critical to chart the ways these ideologies about gender, culture, and poverty are produced in said campaigns to be the prevailing hegemony. As such, my dissertation disrupts the hegemony of what I locate as third world girls + education to reveal the historical, political, and economic background animating schooling as a technology of power and an arm of the western development aid complex.

Lastly, my work aims to push disciplinary boundaries as I contribute to important scholarly debates about gender, schooling, and the economy of international development through a transdisciplinary study that blurs the lines of scholarship, dreaming, and abolition. I draw on postcolonial theory, black feminist theory, black cultural productions, black feminist literary texts, and settler colonial theory to investigate the queries I’ve raised from a kaleidoscopic angle. I bring together this fusion of theory and art praxis to document the terrors of the stitching of third world girls to schooling, and to simultaneously imagine the abolition of global power structures as the antithesis of such (ongoing) terror. This project offers a slow meditation on the horrors and terrors of neoliberal governance that demands capital accumulation at any cost, even at the expense of the body (read as flesh) of a poor, racialized girl to the promises of black radical imagination that dares to dream liberation and authenticate a Black feminist grammar of love. I engage the tensions of the incommensurability that emerge in this kind of complex, layered project.