TITLE:
“Third World” Girls: Gender, Childhood and Colonialism
AUTHORS:
Marília Pinto de Carvalho, Adriano Souza Senkevics
KEYWORDS:
Gender, Girls, Global South
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.5 No.6,
June
16,
2017
ABSTRACT: This paper discusses to what extent a view of “third
world women” as traditional and oppressed still holds with regard to girls from
“developing countries”. For that, we recall the criticisms put forward inside
feminist studies and make use of the debates about how childhood has been perceived
in gender studies, and then
approach the issue of girls from the global South. Next, we try to apprehend
how girls from the global South have been represented in the recent academic
production in this field and, finally, we present some of the results from our
fieldworks in Brazil to exemplify how this standardized outlook hinders the
understanding of the complexity of the lives of girls situated within their
contexts.