The Ethics of Visibilities: Sport for Development Media Portrayals of Girls and Women

Abstract

An array of Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) programs focused on girls and young women are utilizing social media platforms (e.g., Instagram, Twitter) and digital technologies (i.e., websites, YouTube) to garner international attention and raise funds for their initiatives. In the context of the “Girl Effect” in development, we are increasingly seeing girls and young women from the Global South in action – playing soccer, climbing walls, riding skateboards, and engaging in an array of other sports. While such visual representations suggest a positive move away from what some have termed “poverty porn” that tends to victimize those from the Global South, in this chapter we argue for a need for more nuanced critical understanding of the power relations and ethics involved in the representation of girls and women from the Global South (Cornwall, 2016; Wilson, 2011). Located at the intersection of postfeminist, neoliberal and posthumanitarian discourses, many such representations are culturally complex, inspiring and/or intriguing to audiences in the Global North and thus are highly effective in garnering the attention of potential donors. In many cases, however, such images are essentially presenting “brown girls” as the “exotic other[s]” (Said, 1978) for the consumption of audiences from the Global North. As Sensoy and Marshall (2010) suggest, if we view such initiatives and representations as “a political text mired in its social context and tied to historically bound colonial discourses and material power relations, then we can ask a different set of questions”: around whom do such organizations represent and “how far the right to represent extends”? (p. 309). According to Sensoy and Marshall (2010), media portrayals of girls and women in such programs demand a “close[r] examination of who represents whom, for what purposes and with what results” (p. 309).