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There has been a notable increase in the public visibility of girl activists in the past ten years. In this article, I analyze media narratives about several individual girl activists to highlight key components of the newly desirable figure of the girl activist. After tracing the expansion of girl power discourses from an emphasis on individual empowerment to the invocation of girls as global saviors, I argue that girls are particularly desirable figures for public consumption because the encoding of girls as symbols of hope helps to resolve public anxieties about the future, while their more radical political views are managed through girlhood’s association with harmlessness. Ultimately, the figure of the hopeful and harmless girl activist hero is simultaneously inspirational and demobilizing.

Activists in the Peruvian working children’s movement have been theorizing about “children’s protagonismo” for nearly 40 years. Changing political contexts and the infusion of discourses from other social movements have produced three major sets of meanings for this concept, each reflecting different dynamics in Peruvian social movement history. First, the concept, infused with ideas from liberation theology and Latin American engagements with Marxism, was primarily understood in terms of class struggle and collective organization. Second, because of opportunities and threats in the 1980s and 1990s, it became more closely associated with children’s rights frameworks. Third, since the early 2000s, the movement’s approach to protagonismo has drawn on indigenous theories of interdependence and relationality to challenge the individualism of neoliberal capitalism and governmentality. In holding these diverse ideological commitments together, the concept has allowed the movement of working children to communicate across multiple discursive communities.Los activistas del movimiento de los niños trabajadores peruanos han teorizado sobre el “protagonismo infantil” durante casi 40 años. Los cambios en el contexto político y la influencia de discursos pertenecientes a otros movimientos sociales han generado tres grandes conjuntos de significado alrededor de este concepto, cada uno de los cuales reflejando distintas dinámicas en la historia del movimiento social peruano. Primero, el concepto se entendió en términos de clase imbuidos por ideas de la teología de la liberación, así como actitudes latinoamericanas de compromiso con el marxismo y la organización colectiva. Posteriormente, a raíz de las oportunidades y amenazas de las décadas de 1980 y 90, se relacionó de manera más estrecha con el marco de los derechos del niño. Desde principios de la década del 2000, el enfoque del protagonismo se ha ligado a teorías indígenas de la interdependencia y la relacionalidad para desafiar el individualismo del capitalismo neoliberal y la gobernabilidad. Al unir tal diversidad de compromisos ideológicos, el concepto ha permitido que el movimiento de los niños trabajadores tenga voz en múltiples comunidades discursivas.

This article explores U.S. teenage girls' rejections of “politics,” arguing that for some girls, the refusal to identify with politics is a discursive strategy informed by their consciousness of inequality and their commitments to social justice. Drawing upon interviews, focus groups, and participant observation, I show how two different groups of girls reflect on their varied experiences of political marginalization as aged, gendered, racialized, and classed subjects in order to develop a critique of the practices and policies of the U.S. government. Building on research on the various and complex meanings of political disaffection, I argue that defining politics very narrowly and then distancing oneself from it can be part of an oppositional political project, and I address myself to the implications and mechanisms of girls' use of this strategy.The author would like to thank France Winddance Twine, Verta Taylor, Avery Gordon, Richard Flacks, Leila Rupp, and the editors and reviewers from Politics & Gender for their insightful comments and assistance in the development of this article. This material is based upon work supported under a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.