“Girl” in Crisis: Colonial Residues of Domesticity in Transnational School Reforms CHRISTOPHER KIRCHGASLER AND KARISHMA DESAI Investment in girls’ education is offered as a salve to the Global South that will alleviate poverty, prevent terrorism, and curb gender-based violence. Rather than treat this thesis and its evidentiary basis as axiomatic, we examine some of the conditions for the intelli- gibility of this crisis, prevalent in much international development and education reform discourse today. Archival study of transnational school reforms in Kenya Colony—spe- cifically the Jeanes School in the 1920s and 1930s and Mau Mau prison camp reeducation in the 1950s and 1960s—makes visible how domesticity has offered a shifting biopolitical strategy, wherein acceding to one’s properly gendered roles was made a condition for economic and political maturity for racialized populations. We explore how residues of colonial domesticity persist in the exceptionalism of the girl, yoking the performance of “proper” notions of modern girl and womanhood as conditions for social progress and economic development. Introduction Manifold crises have emerged in the “developing world” in recent decades— economic, refugee, and climate, to name a few. The naming of a crisis is political. It unifies a disparate set of problems and reduces them to a few key variables; it establishes and legitimizes expertise; and it makes anticipated futures palpable, inciting and focusing interventions. Perhaps no crisis has captured the attention of international education and reform efforts today more than the concern and hope bestowed upon the girl. This “girl crisis” is evinced by global campaigns that highlight stark inequalities in girls’ school attendance, inequities in achievement, and their myriad vulnerabilities (see, e.g., Urban 2017; Plan 2019) and have been attested to by economists’ re- search (see, e.g., King and Hill 1993). With calibrated concern for girls comes qualified optimism. If the crisis is addressed, coordination achieved, and benchmarks met, women and girls promise to unleash a cascade of social effects that will alleviate poverty, pre- vent terrorism, and curb gender-based violence (Girl Effect 2015). The World Bank expresses this logic succinctly: “Girls’ education is a strategic develop- ment priority. Better educated women tend to be healthier, participate more Received August 9, 2019; revised February 24, 2020; accepted March 11, 2020; electronically published July 15, 2020 Comparative Education Review, vol. 64, no. 3. q 2020 by the Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved. 0010-4086/2020/6403-0004$10.00 384 August 2020