“The medicine for fire is fire.”

Abstract

“Negotiating Schoolgirlhood,” uses schoolgirls’ stories to destabilize the dichotomy that has come to represent young female subjectivity in Global South: the girl-child and the schoolgirl. Nashipae and Felista’s experiences illustrate how Maasai schoolgirlhood exceeds oversimplified accounts of gendered vulnerability or gendered agency. Nashipae’s struggle for school calls into question the inherent vulnerability of the girl-child. Felista’s situation, conversely, alerts us to the contradictions of the schoolgirl as unequivocally empowered. These schoolgirls’ stories show the challenges Maasai girls face as they work to individually circumvent, reinvent, and ultimately surmount structural relations of power in order to embody and perform schoolgirlhood. This chapter foregrounds what girl-effects logic often elides: Maasai schoolgirls are relational subjects enmeshed in social formations and power relations as Maasai daughters.