Abstract

The Nike Foundation’s flagship corporate social responsibility campaign, ‘The Girl Effect’, has generated support for targeted investments in adolescent girls as the ‘key’ economic development in the global south. As a representational regime, the campaign is an example of an increasingly hegemonic discourse of global girl power via formal education. In an era of ‘sexualisation moral panic’ regarding representations of contemporary young female sexual subjectivities in the global north, this article considers ideological figurings of adolescent female sexual embodiment in the global south through a discursive analysis of the campaign’s three most popular viral videos.