Beyond Heroes and Hostility: Greta Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate, and The Transnational Politics of Girl Power

ABSTRACT This article develops a feminist and democratic theory of girls’ activism framed around the work of Greta Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate, and the global youth climate movement. It draws from recent work in girlhood studies to criticize the discourse of the “girl hero” and challenge the two dominant ways that political theorists engage with girls and politics or political change, through Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone and Hannah Arendt’s “Reflections on Little Rock.” A politics of heroism, I argue, unwittingly invests itself in the hostility the hero must face and overcome and therefore minimizes the political networks that make politics possible. Through my readings of Thunberg and Nakate, I attend to girl activists’ local attachments within family, community, and nation; intergenerational, transnational, and transcontinental relationships; and the effects of colonialism, white supremacy, and misogyny and anti-feminism. Underscoring networks of support and solidarity (rather than hostility that the girl hero must face down), I provide a new way of thinking about girls and politics (and politics, in general) outside of the framework of heroism.