Imagining neoliberal feminisms? Thinking critically about the US diplomacy campaign, ‘Empowering Women and Girls Through Sports’

Abstract

This paper builds upon the sport for development scholarship that critically explores how Western ideals of gender and sport are mobilized within sport development campaigns. This growing body of development scholarship (e.g. Hayhurst, 2013, “Girls as the ‘New’ Agents of Social Change? Exploring the ‘Girl Effect’ Through Sport, Gender and Development Programs in Uganda,” Sociological Research Online, 18 [2]; Chawansky, 2012, “Good Girls Play Sports: International Inspiration and the Construction of Girlhood,” Feminist Media Studies 3: 473–476) critically examines the taken-for-granted liberatory character that frequently accompanies accounts of sport's allegedly progressive role in supporting gender equity. Grounded in this scholarship and transnational feminist sensibilities, this paper critically examines the rhetoric to inspire and assist women in ‘developing’ nations, via the US State Department's global ‘Empowering Women and Girls Through Sports’ diplomacy campaign. Rather than focusing on those who participate in these programmes and the alleged positive results of such programmes, this analysis instead contextualizes this initiative. This analysis additionally exposes the underlying rhetorical assumptions of this campaign in order to interrogate the ways that national security, ‘developed’ nations, gendered equity, empowerment, and the alleged benevolent role of the US State Department and capital are imagined in these sporting discourses – discourses which also signal the rise of neoliberal feminism. The paper concludes by discussing the continuing need to embody ‘reflexive non-innocence’ (Hemmings, 2011, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory, Durham: Duke University) while interrogating popular narratives that constitute discourses of gender equity and feminism both within sport studies and more broadly.