ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I offer an institutional genealogy of the term ‘girl child’, tracing how its age coordinates shifted in its trajectory from Indian demographic research to UN bureaucracies, NGO actions, and corporate campaigns. The term ‘girl child’ emerged in India in the 1980s amidst concerns over skewed sex ratios. The term travelled, I argue, from Indian contexts to UN contexts in the late 1980s and early 1990s and spurred the later fascination with the girl as a target of humanitarian efforts in the 2000s and 2010s. In our time, the figure of the ‘promising girl’ has displaced the ‘Third World woman’ as the archetypal focus of international development interventions. I ask how this came to be, analysing UN documents and subject indexes, tracing what I see as a discursive explosion: From a trickle of references until the early 1990s, girls drew increasing attention in the mid-1990s and gained even greater institutional stature from the mid-2000s to 2010s. My genealogy of the term ‘girl child’ reveals that from its early moorings in the problem of female infanticide, foeticide, and malnutrition, this interest turned a more specific focus on investing in adolescent girls, with an eye towards their reproductive futures.
