Yuval-Davis (2006: 200) cautioned against reducing intersectional analyses to a focus on identities, within (global) feminist politics. She argued that social positionings, identities and political values are distinct from, and not reducible to, each other, and what is important is understanding how each is constructed, and how they interrelate/affect each other in specific contexts and locations. This is because each of these (positioning, political value, identity) has its own ontological basis, and, ‘in specific historical situations and in relation to specific people there are some social divisions which are more important than others in constructing specific positionings’ (2006: 203).
Following Yuval-Davis, we can view social divisions as also existing at the representational level: in symbols, texts, images, ideologies. Certain global activists, therefore, arguably represent or seek to call attention to and change inequalities relating to specific social divisions, which, more often than not, intersect with each other (or with other divisions) in complex ways. This paper applies Yuval-Davis’ observations to an analysis of girls’ rights activist this year’s joint Nobel-prize winner Malala Yousafzai, who has emerged as a global advocate of girls’ rights to education, following a near-fatal attempt on her life by the Taliban in December 2012. ‘The Malala effect’ refers to the ways in which, at the representational level, intersectionality is an important heuristic device for understanding the inter-relatedness of the positionings, identity and political values of certain global activists. Analysing a number of online articles, interviews and blogs about Ms. Yousafzai, the paper addresses questions such as: How do global activists position themselves in relation to the inequalities they are seeking change, and how are they positioned by others? What is the relationship between those positionings, the activist’s identity (as she expresses it herself, and as it is ‘read’ by others), and her political values?
