Postures of Empowerment: Cultivating Aspirant Feminism in a Ugandan NGO

The Kampala Programme for Empowering Girls, a Ugandan NGO, is part of a much larger transnational movement that aims to psychologically, economically, and politically empower adolescent girls around the world. Global girls’ empowerment advocates draw from the convergence of two lines of research: long‐standing demographic studies that correlate girls’ schooling with fewer and healthier pregnancies and western developmental psychology's concern with the adolescent girl's presumed crisis of self‐esteem. Yet, as anthropologists have long shown, the ways people grow up are culturally and historically specific. In order to “empower” young women in urban Uganda, the internationally educated, elite women running the NGO had to persuade their participants to articulate low self‐esteem, even as these young women claimed complete confidence. To do so, elite NGO officers entwined explicit feminist pedagogy with tastes for foreign foods, fashion, and travel, cultivating what I call “aspirant feminism”—a desire for membership in the transnational feminist movement because it offers pathways to social mobility that are both desirable and difficult to obtain for young Ugandan women. Paradoxically, the workshop became both the grounds for developing new aspirational capacities as well as an arena for the reproduction of class difference.