Abstract
This article analyses how South African Indian teenage men and women conceptualise desire, sex and love, their resistance to and accommodation of gender inequalities within relationship dynamics. It calls attention to a reconceptualisation of childhoods that extends agency to sexuality beyond a preoccupation with sexual danger. By focusing on the diversity of sexual meanings, attention is given to the plurality of childhood sexual experiences among South African Indian teenagers. Finally, the article argues that deeper insight into teenage pleasure and power can sharpen interventions that promote healthy teenage sexualities.
Introduction
Love … you can’t really explain … It gives you butterflies and goose bumps all at the same time … you either going to have to wait for that person or go looking for it. (Amy)
A striking feature of childhoods in South Africa – which often receives very little commentary because of the assumed association with sexual vulnerability – is that sexual exploration is desire-filled, potentially erotic and expressive of power. Associating childhood sexuality with pleasure and agency sits uncomfortably with reports which reinforce sexual danger, disease and young women’s disproportionate vulnerability to sexual suffering. Between 2013 and 2014, for example, 45,230 contact crimes against children were reported, of which 50% were sexual offences – an average of 62 cases per day (South African Police Services, 2014). Sexual violence against children is articulated in the nexus of deep structural inequalities, underwritten by the history of apartheid. Thus, an enduring conceptualisation of childhood in South Africa remains hinged on sexual vulnerability and suffering. Carton (2000) notes that on the continent, teenagers are often portrayed simply as victims in ‘endemic calamity’. The conceptualisation of sexual suffering and calamity eliminates the notion of teenagers as sexual agents with passions and desires.
This article breaks from this preoccupation of teenagers facing sexual crises and sexual calamity from which they need to be rescued. Instead of discarding teenage desire and passion, the article begins with Amy, who like the rest of the participants in this study, is 16 turning 17. They are classified as South African Indian 1 – a legacy of apartheid racial policies – and live in the mixed middle- to low-income former Indian townships that are located in the KwaZulu-Natal province of the country. The participants emerge from a population group that comprises 2.5% of the population in the country (Statistics South Africa, 2011). They are rarely the focus of attention, perhaps because of low teenage pregnancy and HIV prevalence rates estimated to be below 1% (Shisana et al., 2014).
By addressing teenagers as knowing, desiring and active sexual agents (Kehily, 2004), I ask, ‘how do teenage males and females constitute their sexuality?’ I argue that teenage male and female conceptions of desire and love – indispensable to the making of young heterosexual relationships – serve as important anchors (Frye and Trinitapoli, 2015) in the social constitution of teenage sexuality; conversely, the expressions of sexual desires within relationship dynamics can be distressful in the context of enduring patterns of gender power inequalities, the regulation of female sexualities and surveillance.
Theoretical approach
The article has several objectives in advancing a theoretical approach to understand teenage sexuality in South Africa. First, it seeks to shift attention to a lesser known racial group of teenagers in South Africa. Indian teenage sexualities in South Africa remain, with few exceptions, unacknowledged (Bhana and Pattman, 2008). The relative silence on Indian teenage sexualities underscores the need for an understanding of the plurality in the experience of childhood sexuality. A consideration of context, class and race in the production of teenage sexualities serves to correct the uniformity of meanings around childhood. As Kehily (2004) argues, childhood is not pre-given, but there are multiple childhoods as a result of race, class and social context and even within social contexts variations exist.
Second, the article seeks to contribute to an existing body of work that calls for the reconceptualisation of childhoods away from the grim and bleak depiction of vulnerability but in a different way. It is well established that African teenagers are agents working on their circumstances rather than simply victims as often portrayed in the media (Ansell, 2014; Campbell et al., 2015). Agency is mediated and teenagers are active agents in exercising and expressing power. They navigate their social conditions and contribute to economic livelihoods showing resilience (Abebe and Kjørholt, 2009). By drawing from the sociology of childhood studies (see James et al., 1998), popular representations of childhoods as unprotesting and victims are changing. In revisioning childhoods on the continent, a more complex double-edged version of agency is considered mediated within social and economic contexts (Ansell, 2014). Teenagers shape as they are shaped by their social conditions. This premise of agency, however, is limited in its application to teenagers as sexual agents (Bhana and Pattman, 2011) which this article seeks to expand.
Thus, the third objective is to seek to extend the understanding of agency that is sexualised, pleasurable and erotic as it is deeply embedded within relations of power (Weeks, 2000). This conceptualisation of teenage sexuality as pleasurable is controversial especially as many researchers in the West suggest that young people’s sexualities are often appropriate mainly in the domain of sexual innocence and abstinence (Schalet, 2010). Indeed, a dual focus on teenage sexuality not narrowly focused on danger could broaden the ways in which sexualities are expressed. This might create opportunities for young people to take control of their sexual decisions and distinguish the exercise of coercive sex. Throughout the world, teenage romance, desire and love are a vital part of building sexual relationships – which can be both pleasurable and deeply problematic especially in the context of gendered norms, violence, teenage pregnancy and disease (Allen, 2005; Frosh et al., 2002; Kehily, 2004). Sexual agency thus involves knowing how desire operates, recognising and being able to express sexual and romantic thoughts and sexual acts while taking control of and understanding sexual desires in relation to unwanted coercive practices (Frye and Trinitapoli, 2015; Schalet, 2010). This article draws attention to affective dimensions of sexuality. It focuses on the emotional bonds within relationship dynamics and young people’s desire for the erotic. In doing so, the article draws attention simultaneously to a highly regulatory discursive environment where female sexuality is especially curtailed.
Young people desire and invest in pleasure. However, sexual agency, as many feminist scholars have noted (Hamilton and Armstrong, 2009; Schalet, 2010), is highly regulated by gendered norms advantaging male sexual prowess and fuelling a non-sexual agency for young women. Men are accorded power through the expression of sexuality, while women’s status is upheld by an idealisation based on sexual innocence, virginity and purity.
In the social construction of sexuality, gender shapes how men and women are positioned in relations of power (Allen, 2005). It is often assumed that men are active sexually and women are sexually passive. However, as many scholars have noted, the ways in which masculinities and femininities are played out is more complex than familiar versions of gender roles and identities (Allen, 2005; Bhana and Pattman, 2011). Teenagers resist, challenge and accommodate sexual and gender norms, providing possibilities for new ways of imagining gender relations while intricately connected to gendered patterns based on hierarchical relations of power. As Allen (2013) suggests, greater insight into the ways young people conceptualise ‘real-life’ sexuality is vital for gender equitable relationships and negotiation of positive forms of teenage sexuality. In South Africa, Gevers et al. (2013) note, the ways in which teenage relationships are shaped and understood by people themselves are important to inform intervention programmes.
In extending the current understandings of sexual agency, another objective is to provide a more nuanced way in which childhood sexualities are produced. Various scholars have problematised sexuality in relation to childhood (Allen, 2005; Bhana, 2016; Frosh et al., 2002; Kehily, 2004). Arguing against the conceptualisation of children as innocent, this field of childhood studies argues that teenagers are actively involved in the making of sexuality rather than simply dupes of power. Conceptually, sexuality and childhoods have been understood and dramatised as risk (Schalet, 2010), presented as dangerous, as death and disease, assuming that such a focus may help young people avoid risky sexual behaviour. As such, scant attention is paid to sexual pleasure and the erotic, preventing an exploration of sexuality as context-bound, varying and pleasurable. Instead of constructing teenagers as in need of protection from adults, at risk and vulnerable, their active investments and participation in sexual cultures as gendered beings within local contexts are advanced within childhood studies (Allen, 2005).
An abiding concern in this article is the way in which Indian South African teenagers express their sexualities in ways that take heed of their social and cultural contexts. Teenagers are not outside the social and cultural contexts in which they navigate gender and sexuality. For instance, masculinities and femininities are produced in relation to dominant understandings of male sexual prowess and feminine virtue. While these understandings are actively challenged, they remain powerful in shaping, as young people shape, gender. Teenage agency is thus conceived of as in tension with the broader social environment where ideas about masculinity and femininity are based on relations of power where women’s agency is often limited by cultural and gendered power imbalances (Ratele, 2015). As Carton (2000) argues, ‘on a continent so vast … wide social diversity (myriad ethnic groups), and remarkable continuities … the main concern is to devise a framework through which to examine variations in children’s roles’ (p. 31). This article foregrounds the plurality and heterogeneity in the experience of teenage sexuality in South Africa. It brings attention to gender, sexual agency and pleasure as well as enduring patterns of inequalities within a local setting in the country.
The study
The data for this article come from four single-sex focus group discussions (FGDs) – a subset of a larger qualitative study titled ‘16 turning 17 youth, gender and sexuality in the context of HIV and AIDS’. The larger study is based on 44 FGDs with teenagers across various schools in KwaZulu-Natal, which sought to investigate the experiences and ways that teenagers give meaning to sexuality. The schools are located in different social settings reflecting the race and class landscape of South Africa. While many schools are changing in terms of their racial profiles, the legacies of apartheid remain in terms of racial makeup of learners at school. Schools were purposively selected based on their race and class context. In this article, I draw from the FGDs conducted at two former Indian schools located in areas formerly designated as Indian, where the majority of learners are Indian and from low-middle- to middle-income settings. Chatsworth and Newlands West are Indian townships which emerged from the history of apartheid which demarcated residential areas according to racial classifications. Indian South Africans, particularly those from working class contexts, were housed in this neighbourhood. Currently, however, due to changing educational and economic opportunities, the neighbourhoods are considered to be a mixed zone of working class and middle-income groups with changing racial dynamics.
Access to the school sites was approved by the school’s principals. Letters were sent to grade 11 learners describing the study. Those interested in participating were asked to return signed consent forms. The distribution and final selection of learners and FGDs were managed by student researchers. All participation was voluntary and anonymity was guaranteed. Each of the four FGDs comprised six participants randomly selected from those who had signed consent forms and were willing to participate outside of school hours.
FGDs lasted approximately 90 minutes and were based on a flexible interview guide. The FGDs posed questions such as the following: Do teenage males and females of your age have boyfriends and girlfriends? Do you have boyfriends and girlfriends? What matters to you in these relationships? Tell me what you expect in the relationships? Do young people of your age have sex? Topics were probed further depending on how teenagers framed the discussion but included discussions of their pleasures, love, anxieties, issues around cheating and trust, and their relationship with their parents. Participants were not obligated to discuss their own personal circumstances although many chose to provide rich descriptions of their relationships. Not all were involved in relationships, although the thought of relationships and romantic ideals shaped discussions of sexuality. Teenagers spoke freely about how they experienced and imagined relationship dynamics and were highly motivated to discuss issues around sexuality that, as Allen (2005) indicates, occupy a central part of their everyday lives. All FGDs were recorded and transcribed. Braun and Clarke’s (2006) system of thematic coding was used which involved identifying and interpreting the entire data-set for repeated patterns of meaning. The next stage involved highlighting potential themes by using a coding system. The final part of the analysis involved the refinement of the themes in relation to the entire data-set.
There are certain limitations with FGDs including the risk of maintaining discourses based on group approval as well as the limits of revealing explicit details regarding sex especially when a non-sexual gendered identity is valued for teenage females. Sexual innocence is expected for young women. The expression of masculinity, on the other hand, is based on sexual conquest. Another limitation is the exaggerated emphasis on sexual activities and male power within the male FGDs. However, despite those potential limitations, as the data illustrate, while teenage males did express their masculinities through male sexual prowess, there was also evidence of love and care within relationship dynamics. Teenage females were vocal about their pleasures and desires and talked explicitly for example about oral sex. Finally, the discussion is based on a small sample; thus, the analysis must be considered in relation to this particular data-set and may not be generalised. In the next section, the article foregrounds relationship dynamics and teenage expressions of desire while focusing on ways in which sexuality shapes and regulates gender relations of power.
Exploring pleasure, exploring gender and sexuality
Teenage male desires
Teenage male desire, their investment in and pursuit of pleasure is often relegated to concerns about the operation of unequal gender relations within intimate partner relations (Gevers et al., 2013). Teenage males, unlike females, are accorded the status of sexual agents but only so far as such agency is clustered around violence and men’s pursuit of multiple partners, producing suffering and pain. An omission in the research is the intersection of masculinity with desire that strays from a uniform conceptualisation of aggressive masculinities. Thus, there remains little commentary of male desires, passions and excitements except as it concerns male culpability in the production of female vulnerability (Gevers et al., 2013). As I set out below, teenage males do foreground heterosexual desires in order to solidify male status and ranking (Alldred and Fox, 2015; Frosh et al., 2002), but how it is shaped bears the mark of context. Teenage desires were expressed through the discussion of boyfriends, girlfriends and the dynamics of such relationships, which both accommodated and resisted stereotypical versions of masculinity.
Not all the teenage males were sexually active, although like teenage female participants, they were not obligated to disclose personal sexual experiences. They did, however, describe both real and imagined ideals of romantic relationships situating them within intimate partner relations. ‘Being together’, ‘being in love’, ‘having fun’, ‘enjoying each other’s company’, going out to ‘movies and house parties’, ‘hanging together’ at school and after school, texting and communicating with each other with loving messages formed part of teenage sexual rituals. This included having arguments, fighting with each other, breaking up and making up, suggesting a great deal of flexibility in the ways relationships were constructed:
… I delete her off BBM (Blackberry Messenger), then the next couple hours I’ll invite her again, and tell her I love her. (Rishi)
Social networking systems including the BBM were common media through which desires and pleasures were articulated, foregrounded by affective dimensions of love. Teenage males conceptualised relationships as vital to their masculine well-being, and well-being was intertwined with pleasures, desires and sexual excitement. Love, pleasure and sexual exploration often revolved around kissing:
We explore … A basic thing about a girl … How they kiss … Uh, when you put your tongue in her mouth and she puts her tongue in yours … Look at the marks on his[Don’s] neck … (Joe)
Disturbing the common trend that proves sexual agency in relation to male control, Joe situates masculinity within the erotic domain of teenage sexuality. As Allen (2005) suggests, a discourse of erotics is embedded within sexual desire – the mutual transfer of pleasure. Sexuality is pleasure, eroticised and gendered. Teenage pleasure is derived from the sensual practices of the tongue and reference to the ‘love bite’. To solidify masculinity, Joe turns the attention to Don and says ‘look at the marks on his neck’. The ‘love bite’ caused through sucking of the neck is a stamp of heterosexual activity and within the group dynamic accords masculine status. Joe’s turn to Don functions to provide peer approval, ranking and normalisation of male heterosexual activity.
Kissing was also constructed as a key moment through which relationships were solidified as fun, pleasurable and ‘serious’:
It would have been six months on the ninth of this month. First time ever in my life, I think, the longest I’ve been out with a girl … But there’s fun, fun relationships … even if you serious, you know that you kissed, if you don’t kiss a girl it is an un-serious relationship, you know. (Brandon)
Sexual intimacy and desire went beyond a crude understanding of sex. It involved discussions about being serious, length of time in a relationship and sexual activities which involved kissing but not necessarily sex. The participants were not asked whether they engaged in sex but responded in relation to a range of sexual activities. As Weeks (2000) suggests, sexuality is discursively constructed and clusters around pleasure, desire, excitements, practices, techniques, lifestyles and habits and is not only about sexual penetration:
Kissing, touching, like, you know, like hugging, the usual stuff but we don’t like force or push a girl to do something ’cos you have to respect her … (Alan)
Alan normalises kissing, hugging and touching as ‘usual stuff’ within teenage relationship dynamics but resists pushing further to sexual intercourse. Male pleasure and desire are thus not routinely and automatically about sex but reflective of power dynamics. Contradictorily, respect and male power are conflated. Alan notes that ‘we don’t like force or push a girl’ while reproducing an active male within intimate partner relations and a passive female who is potentially a victim of sexual coercion. Masculinity is produced through the constitution of male power within intimate relations – males are seen to determine the nature of sexual relations – whether forced or not thus accommodating hegemonic versions of masculinity.
Teenage males also spoke about sex and sexual experience embedded within passion, erotics and desire:
Mine was first in a taxi … (other boys laugh) … 15.
Ok, my ex-girlfriend Nicole, uh, I went to her house and uh, … so uh, we was watching a movie, then this part came where the girl was naked, right, and she was next to me, and then in the movie they were having sex, then she turned and she whispered in my ear, ‘Imagine if we do that?’. I’m, I’m like, I’m just like smiling at her. I didn’t know what to say.
Last year, right, … she was with her towel and uh, she came back down with her towel and … then she came down in her underwear, like, lace (other boys laugh) for true, she came with lace underwear, then she took my hand and she went upstairs, we went upstairs …
Sexual success with women is central to masculinity-making in South Africa, and this discussion must be understood in the ways in which teenage males themselves were articulating positions of sexual power in the FGDs. At the same time, the discussions reveal an understanding of teenage sexuality that is different from men as sexual predators and affords teenage females far more agency than previously considered. The discussion is also premised on the erotic depiction of skin and nakedness, sexual imagination (‘imagine if we do that’) and lacy underwear. Active female sexuality is produced through the erotic, through lacy underwear requiring financial resources and against the normative construction of passive female sexuality. Teenage males are the ones who are desired – with teenage females in the examples above and below leading as ‘legitimate desirers’ (Allen, 2013):
I went for a church camp and we was playing nine cards, so I told her every game you win, you get to do something with me, every game I win, I get to do something with you. So I was beating her all the time, and I was kissing her, then I let her win one game to see what she’ll do, … she said ok, ‘I’m never going to win more games so let’s put the lights off and do something better’ … Then finished … Praise the Lord! No condom, no pregnancy, no nothing. (Brandon)
Pleasure is spontaneous and sex happens ‘off guard’. Brandon reinforces an understanding of female sexual agency with young women able to have a say in intimate sexual matters and initiate sex. With pleasure and desire left unattended in discussions around teenage sexuality, the ability of both teenage males and females to engage in sexual relations which are safe are compromised: ‘no condom, no pregnancy, no nothing’. While sexual agency is enacted through pleasure principles and pleasure entitlements, sexual well-being and safety is compromised, placing young people at risk for unintended pregnancy leading Brandon to ‘praise the Lord’. While pleasure and desire suggested emotional ties, excitement embedded within discourses of love; conversely, romantic relationships could also be stressful induced by sex as risk as the above discussion confirms. Overwhelmingly, there was agreement that no one wants to be a ‘daddy at 17, 16’, and despite the example of no condom use, teenage males strongly agreed about its value. Avoiding teenage pregnancy was also fuelled by strong parental surveillance around respect and sexuality:
Ja, and you supposed to make your parents proud … Don’t bring a bad name to the family. (Joe)
Teenage males even suggested that if their parents knew of sexual activities they would be ‘dead’. Landon stated, ‘I’ll have my legs broken, my hands broken …’, with Alvin noting, ‘If my parents found out I had sex they’d kick me out’. He adds, ‘Indian people they like to socialise … They always worried about the other person … what they cooking in the house’.
Being Indian is deployed here to suggest a cultural framework invested in family, respect and the avoidance of social stigma. While teenage males talked, imagined and discussed sexual pleasure, sex was clearly not an automatic response to the construction of their desires:
… ok, sex is something that’s for after marriage … I wouldn’t wanna ruin her life ‘cause when she marries someone else wouldn’t want that person to feel that she’s already used.
Exactly. If you respect a girl to a certain extent, uh, ok, we have fun, we kiss, we touch, we do stuff but that way you must respect her in that way, can’t like force her into something.
But I still think sex isn’t better than love.
Pleasure and desire are strongly connected to masculine norms but not always in the familiar sense of male sexual conquests and entitlements. At age 16 and 17 instead of obsessing with sexual strength and power as Mac an Ghaill (1994) finds with teenage males in the United Kingdom, the participants interpret and reflect on pleasure, desire and sex, resisting the automatic pathway to sexual intercourse. As Bhana and Anderson (2013) suggest, young coloured (see Note 1) men are constructed as ever-ready for sex, invested in salacious forms of sexuality that encompass a risqué masculinity. Here however, sex ‘isn’t better than love’. Thinking about, imagining and discussing sexual pleasure and desire is not the reason why men engage in sexual activities. Masculinities are deeply connected to heterosexuality and involve pleasure (Weeks, 2000). As suggested thus far, pleasure is also connected to love and emotional sentiments. As sexual subjects, young people are able to choose whether or not to have sex.
In accommodating traditional versions of masculinity, however, ideals about female sexuality revolved around passivity and subordination within heterosexual relationships. The depiction of, and the investment in, the preservation of female sexual purity is expressive of male sexual privilege. Embedded within alternate and resistant forms of masculinity are enduring patterns of male complicity in female subordination and passivity that are achieved through the regulation of female virginity and sexuality (Bhana and Anderson, 2013). Referring to ‘slut’, young Indian men in this study, as Joe states, operate on the sexual double standard. He says, ‘How she’s acting around people, not acting sluttish’ and later ‘stash your gold and pick up all the coppers’. Women who act ‘sluttish’ are slandered and constructed as loose while men’s reputation remains intact:
A man can go around the world … but he’ll still be called a man but … a woman … she’ll be called a slut! (Landon)
Teenage female desires
Teenage female sexual desire as suggested in the global context are often inimical to each other, unacknowledged and missing (Allen, 2013; Bhana, 2015; Fine and McClelland, 2006; Frye and Trinitapoli, 2015). As noted earlier, the aggregate forces of gendered ideologies, cultural norms, poverty and male sexual entitlements combine to intensify a one-sided view of teenage females. This version is based upon teenage females as uncontesting, passive victims of male sexual predators (who are corrupted with predatory sexual agency). This construction fuels the conceptualistion of African female sexuality in calamity, under crisis and suffering.
Notwithstanding the enduring patterns of inequalities and hierarchical norms that continue to position young women as subordinate, heterosexual relationships, whether they are experienced, imagined and/or idealised, are an indispensable part of teenage females’ sexual cultures. As Vance (1984) notes, female sexuality is both a domain of pleasure and danger: ‘to focus only on pleasure … ignores the patriarchal structure in which women act, yet to speak of sexual violence and oppression … increases the sexual terror and despair in which women live’. An understanding of teenage females’ desire and agency is thus caught up in gender and heteronormative relations of power, regulated as they regulate sexuality and located under different conditions which enable, frustrate and thwart desire. Teenage females’ relationships are at ‘once treacherous and indispensable’, as Frye and Trinitapoli (2015: 500) argue.
Like teenage males, young women talked about the pleasurable aspects of relationship dynamics, as desiring subjects idealising and describing the positive ways in which relationships were fuelled and how their desires were nurtured in and through these relationships. These included ‘making out’, ‘kissing’, ‘dating’, ‘having supper and lunch together’, ‘serious relationships’ going to ‘house parties’ to make out and were important for sensual connections. They focused heavily on love, trust and on boyfriends with good personalities. Relationships were positive when trust, honesty and respect were strong elements in the dynamic. Conversely, relationships were a source of agony when it involved violence, cheating, jealousy and anguish as they bifurcate love, sexual desire, adult parental regulation and gendered norms based on sexual purity. In the FGDs, their statements express and perhaps reflect hidden anguish. Teenage pleasure and desire cannot be separated from this highly charged regulatory environment.
First, pleasure was situated within relationship dynamics and like teenage males, kissing was key to sealing a relationship, but pleasure was also linked to petting and oral sex:
Obviously we have to kiss them.
Like fingering … blowjobs.
Fingering … some girls do, but they act decent about it, fair enough you don’t want everyone to know, but then don’t do it in public – and blowjobs.
I think that when, you know, when you have sex with someone, it’s someone that you want to be with, someone you plan on being with for a long time because it’s supposed to be something special, so? …
In my version is when, aah when you really love someone and you make that commitment that you both wanna move forward in doing it and it’s this sexual attraction of some sort.
Without conforming to a non-sexual, non-pleasurable agency or victimhood, teenage females may or may not express and act on desire. Like Allen’s (2005, 2013) study of New Zealand teenagers, the teenage females above offer resistance to familiar versions of femininities premised upon non-sexual agency and waiting to be desired. When sex is constructed as special in an enduring relationship and on the side of love, it is positive. Petting and oral sex are not unfamiliar sexual activities for young women, but there is evidence of fear, regulation and stigmatisation of such activities especially when Kiara says that you have to ‘act decent about it’ and ‘don’t do it in public’. Engaging in pleasure is thus possible as Vina and Ajali note but negotiated positively when it is silent, hidden and discreet, as Kiara implies (Harrison, 2008). Gender scholars have addressed the issue of sexual agency and young women’s lack of pleasure and control within intimate partner relations, often blaming men for coercive sexual practices and unfair gender norms shaping sexual relations (Fine and McClelland, 2006; Tolman, 2002). Young women actively participate in transgressing these standards while simultaneously regulating pleasure within the good women/bad women dichotomy. Good women are those who appear as virgins while ambivalently and secretly engaging in and enjoying sexual life (Allen, 2005; Tolman, 2002).
This idea of good women, the quest for respectability and the avoidance of contaminating female sexuality was strongly regulated (as it was contested). Desire and pleasure were situated within a regulatory context induced by gendered and sexual norms based on the assumption of a passive, docile female sexuality with some women focusing on decency and ensuring virginity. Community gossip about women who slept around and men revealing sexual conquests was both scorned and considered a serious deterrent to displays of public sexuality. An overarching concern in negotiating sexual pleasure were parents and the good ‘Indian’ female especially when discussions turned to actual sex:
… mainly amongst Indians … they feel like … more cultured and they like most decent … you have to be religious and you have to dress a certain way and … like, like no cleavage and stuff like that. (Prea)
Teenage desires are socially and culturally marked and discursively constructed in relation to how it is experienced, regulated and felt. The teenagers construct race, sexuality, gender and culture in ways that are separate and distant from other racial groups in South Africa. Decency, religion and demure dress sense especially for teenage females are elevated and essentialised as something inherent among Indians. In doing so, gender and sexuality are being configured through a racialising register of exclusions and assembled as culture. By drawing on an essentialist understanding of race, culture and sexuality to regulate and reify a non-sexual agency, the participants foregrounded parental regulation with culture and tradition:
They [parents] would seriously wanna kill us … and my mother will give me the hiding of my life before.
Ok, right, I honestly wanna make my parents proud, I don’t want them to be disappointed in me … I shouldn’t rush anything.
Sex was not an automatic option in the expression of desire. Rather a social category of decency is attached to ethnicised notions based on culture, religion and traditions. But this conception was fragile as Santi challenges the notion that parents have monolithic power in sexual expression:
I come from a very cultured background so I follow whatever traditions we have to, but there is time for us to be naughty and stuff … No-one’s stopping us from doing that. You can’t be a saint all your life, you have to do naughty things. (Santi)
Intimately tied to pleasure and desire were teenage conceptions of love that featured prominently in discussions linking love with trust and emotional stability, pleasure and well-being. Together, they encapsulate how teenage females constructed relationships as bonds of emotional ties and care:
I love him because of the relationship we built together and because of the way we understand each other. (Anya)
In other FGDs, the seriousness of love within relationship dynamics was reinforced against dominant conceptualisations of teenage love correlated with puppy love:
… ok, most people say puppy love, it’s something like that but when you find this guy that you really love, and you tend to even change for him, then that’s what I call a serious relationship. (Santi)
In another FGD, Mandy says,
Waaw, that’s[love] like a fantasy. Mmmmmmm (laughs) it’s basically someone who will love you for who you are. Honesty is very important, being faithful. Basically they won’t pressure you into doing thing you don’t want to do. They will always love you, trustworthy, they like your best friend and everything at the same time.
The participants are motivated by ideals, fantasies and their experiences of love. This positive aspect of sexuality is deeply intertwined with pleasure and building nurturing relationships. The participants reframe sexuality away from a non-pleasurable impoverished sexual subject to the pursuit of emotional care and romance (both imagined and actual). Material provider masculinity has been found to be key in other research documenting African teenage narratives of love within contexts of economic distress (Bhana and Pattman, 2011). Here, in this study material, support was marginal in the production of romance and love. All the teenage females in the study indulged in discussion of love, romance and boyfriends, but love was also the domain for the expression of concern and inequalities different from the idealised notions that motivate relationships.
Love is ambivalent and like pleasure it is unstable. It is a source of concern and anxiety in the context of lack of trust, cheating and violence. Persisting in teenage females’ account of sexuality are concerns about intimate partner dynamics which are also harmful. As research suggests on a wider scale, young women ‘suffer the most damage from those with whom they are most intimate’ (Hamilton and Armstrong, 2009: 591), and this includes violence, emotional and sexual coercion. There was much discussion about ‘hurt feelings’ when evidence was found of cheating with Prea stating that ‘we know what it feels like so we won’t do that to another person’. In contrast to the idealisation of boyfriends, current and previous boyfriends were constructed as ‘rotten’, ‘players’, ‘charmers’, ‘flirty’ and ‘cheating’ within a wider context of sexual harassment and young women’s sexual objectification with class ramifications:
… the Chatsworth guys are charmers, like the Indian guys will like, you know, like call you like ‘hey girl, what’s your name? what’s your number? Where you from’, you know they like, they like flirt, … the guys here flirt and then the girls fall for it, like especially now, three of them are walking in the road and these guys are walking behind them, that’s how guys are in our surroundings … the guys are like wild … (Riya)
Riya differentiates between charming Chatsworth Indian guys, and Indian guys from other elite neighbourhoods imputing class in the social construction of sexuality. The former are constructed as crass, ‘wild’, while the latter as the conversation proceeds are constructed as ‘like, very like calm, like quiet’. The social context in Chatsworth provides opportunities for girls to fall mainly for ‘charmers’ with negative consequences. Girls are thus complicit in producing their subordination within relationship dynamics. As feminists have argued (Hamilton and Armstrong, 2009), romantic love is painful. The girls in this study, as Riya notes, are also subjugated by romance and limit their power in the interests of men. Enmeshed with love was violence and young women’s critical stance against violence. They noted women’s subordination within relationship dynamics who acquiesce to unequal relations of power while also rejecting relationships based on love and violence:
But once if he hits you, whatever, and you go back, he knows that if I continue doing it … they can say they ‘love you and stuff’ but they still gonna hit you again, so what’s the point? (Kiara)
Here we see how relationships are simultaneously ‘treacherous and indispensable’ (Frye and Trinitapoli, 2015: 500). When teenage females talk about desire, it is impossible to separate such talk from the network of power relations. Power is interwoven in the framing of gender and heterosexuality which suggests both transgression and enduring patterns of inequalities. In the example, the participants acquiesce to male domination as they are invested in traditional notions of femininity and sexuality. Masculine norms are reproduced where emotional attachments and underlying discourses of love become motivations for remaining in violent relationships. On the other end, there is contempt with Kiara emphasising, ‘never ever take abuse’.
Conclusion
In this article, I began with the aim of extending an understanding of teenage agency in relation to sexuality. I have argued that teenagers are ambiguously invested in sexuality. On one hand, teenage sexuality encompasses pleasure and desire. On the other hand, sexuality is simultaneously embedded within a multitude of regulatory forces. Teenagers accommodate, resist and create alternatives for understanding childhood sexualities. By focusing on a select group of middle- to low-middle-income South African Indian teenagers, the article illustrates the plurality of childhoods arguing for recognition of diversity and multiplicity in the social construction of childhood sexuality. The article addresses some of the shortcomings in literature which has been overly focused on producing a one-sided version of power reducing sexuality to sex, rendering a uniform construction of male sexual domination and women’s victimisation.
For teenagers in this study, a conceptualisation of agency that takes heed of pleasure, desire, passion and love reveals more about emotional connections and the manifestation of power and inequalities. From the point of view of young people, the notion of male sexual predators and teenage females suffering from sexualities is unjustified. In resisting traditional gender norms, both teenage males and women connected sexuality with pleasure and presented themselves as desiring and pleasure-seeking. Pleasure is not simply about sex but involves a range of sexual activities, practices that produced emotional attachments and desire. However, pleasure and desire interlock with regulatory forces and produce gendered patterns of inequality upholding masculine norms within relationship dynamics. This included the construction of the ‘slut’, women’s regulation of sexuality through the good women discourse requiring an uncontaminated sexuality and male sexual prerogatives and family patterns which provided an overall surveillance of both teenage males and women’s sexuality. However, this is far more complex, ambivalent and contradictory than a simple reproduction of familiar patterns of male domination and female subservience. Young people negotiate pleasure and danger with relationships constructed, as desirable and burdensome all at once. Cultural prescriptions operated as a distancing mechanism elevating ‘Indian culture’ as superior to and separate from other racial groups undergirded by ‘sexual decency’.
In South Africa, we have yet to take seriously the centrality of pleasures and desires in the social constitution of childhood sexuality. The findings draw attention to the need to reconceptualise existing debates on the social context of sexuality which take cognisance of the plurality of childhoods which are diverse and multiple. Beyond simple constructions of male monolithic power and female subservience, the article draws attention to the affective dimensions of sexuality including love and desire. Young people do not always fit into neat gendered categories with men advancing sexual domination and women waiting to be coerced. Indeed when we recognise young people as pleasure-seeking, invested in relationships, in contradictory ways, under varying social conditions, we might be able to yield richer results about how young people produce sexualities in order to develop more positive ways of relating to each other. As this research has shown, young people have a striking interest in relationships viewed positively when they are expressive of love, care and pleasure. They also experience anguish in relation to gender power inequalities. As Allen (2005) suggests, recognition of the diverse and complex ways in which teenage sexualities are constituted might provide a better approach to improve our efforts to advance positive sexualities. We need new entry into the field of childhood sexualities in Africa which can help elucidate the network of power, the electric current of love and the gendered currency beyond pain, suffering and victimisation.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This material is based upon work supported financially by the National Research Foundation. Any opinion, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and therefore the NRF does not accept any liability in regard thereto.