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Abstract
This thesis proposes to analyze Melinda French Gates’ The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World, a book that positions itself as a primer for the reader from a high-income nation unfamiliar with the globalized feminization of poverty. Through close textual analysis, I will examine French Gates’ cultural, racial, rhetorical, and material privilege and interrogate how she retells women’s stories from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and offers solutions to problems she has not experienced firsthand. This work is significant in demonstrating how white, Western voices tend to speak over marginalized women, thus perpetuating marginalization even when drawing attention to those women’s struggles or offering material aid. Using the tools of postcolonial studies, rhetorical studies, and research ethics, I will investigate how French Gates discusses women’s need for contraception in LMICs while reinscribing her own position as a wealthy, white outsider. This thesis will demonstrate how French Gates interacts with individual women and communities and then uses her privileged position to speak on their behalf and to share their stories of suffering in ways that do not benefit them. This work has powerful implications for public health policy, private and public philanthropy, mainstream and academic discussions of extreme global poverty, and a general understanding of how to increase the agency of marginalized women living in LMICs.