Undesirable Girls: The Politics of Desire, Love, Self-Making in Dropping Out of School to Work

Abstract

Despite overarching global discourse on pushing for investment into girls' education, there is still a predominant pattern of girls of school age ending their education early to enter the work force. Development goals leverage formal education as a means of girls' empowerment and the natural resource for economic development in the global south. This thesis project seeks to leverage desire as method of understanding the multiplicity of agency and empowerment for girls in the global south that drop out of school to enter the garment industry. The pleasure that women receive from self-taught employment, or from moving from rural to urban spaces actively performs desirability to be the modern, money-earning urban woman. Simultaneously, the ideal garment factory worker is a young girl in her teens, because of her supposed agile and nimble fingers. An industry that crafts the ideal worker as a young teenage girl has an added relationship of exchange; there is a constant feeling of desire, purpose, and necessity. Weaving the multiple structures of desire that shape the decision-making process girls make when choosing to enter the garment industry, the thesis problematizes a completely defeating narrative of the garment industry, and creates a space to explore how girls experiment with the terms by which they are categorized as desirable or undesirable girls through their own definitions of family, trends, love, success, and labor, which reflect a belief that the ability to experience a creatively self-determined life is a basic human right—even while becoming an intimate source of global exploitation.