Desire and constraint in the construction of South African teenage women’s sexualities

Abstract

Understanding the ways in which South African teenage women give meaning to sexuality is important particularly in the context of increased risk to HIV and violence. Drawing from a focus-group interview with teenage women, this article challenges representations of African female sexuality as docile, in suffering and pain. Instead the article argues that teenage women’s construction of sexuality reveals both agency and complicity with male power. Agency was evident in the expression of sexual desire and pleasure and the ability to act on same-sex relations. Agency was ambiguous however and constrained by the need to protect sexual reputations, complicity in violent gender relations and the use of alcohol and drugs which serves to advance male sexual opportunities and power. The article demonstrates the need to work with young women as sexual agents, constrained by unequal relations of power, understanding and reflecting on their complicity in the reproduction of inequalities as well as taking heed of the diverse contexts within which gender relations are produced in South Africa.

Keywords

Agency gender sexuality South Africa teenage women

Since researchers have begun to examine the ways in which young African sexualities are constructed, a number of recent studies have begun to problematize teenage women’s roles and their gendered positions within heterosexual relationships (Bhana and Pattman, 2011; Jewkes and Morrell, 2012; Muhanguzi, 2011; Reddy and Dunne, 2007). The effects of HIV in South Africa (particularly on young women between the ages of 15 and 24) and pervasive forms of inequalities and violence have been crucial in harvesting a view of African female sexualities as docile, in suffering and pain (Reddy, 2004). The sharp edges of social inequalities and the effects of apartheid have contributed to a machinery of sexual oppression leading many to assume a passive and homogenous African femininity. On a different approach to one that confines African women to a totalizing narrative on patriarchy and inequality, researchers now suggest that while male power is pervasive, it is simultaneously contested and negotiated in ways that permit a measure of female agency (Bhana and Pattman, 2011). Against the familiar portrayal of docility and sexual passivity, young women are seen as strategizers who create sexual meanings within a context of sexual oppression and resistance. This article is situated within this emerging research around young South African femininities.

Taking issue with the constructions of a homogeneous and static African femininity, this article shows how femininities are being produced through active investment in sexual cultures of desire, whilst strongly objecting to, resisting and adapting to male sexual power. Critical of conventional femininities which Reddy and Dunne (2007) name as risky, the young women in this study express their agency, resist stereotypical definitions of passivity whilst highly alert to conventional femininity that limit agency. To elaborate upon this complexity, the article draws on the narratives of teenage women, aged 16–17, classified under apartheid as coloured.¹ In fragmenting the notion of a homogenous African female sexuality, the article argues for more nuanced research on teenage sexualities beyond those categories defined as risky as it elaborates upon coloured teenagers often missing in debate, research and interventions around sexuality in South Africa (Anderson, 2010; Salo, 2002 are exceptions). Serving as a corrective to homogenous assumptions about female sexuality, research around young people’s’ sexual cultures is seeking to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the diverse African social contexts in which the sexual experiences’ of young women are constituted (Bhana and Pattman, 2009, 2011). Taking heed of the diverse social and racialized contexts, these studies present overwhelming evidence of the diversity of African female sexualities as they are constructed within specific social and cultural contexts in South Africa.

Contextual variations in the experiences of young sexualities in South Africa are important as they take on different co-ordinates as they intersect with local cultures. Sexualities, as Hearn (2008) argues, persist in relations with other social experiences and inequalities around gender, class and race. Social inequalities in South Africa are intimately connected to and have strong associations with the ways in which coloured teenagers’ articulate sexualities. Teenage women, as this article will go on to show, are less powerful but not powerless. Coloured teenagers express different forms of sexual desire, are complicit in reproducing a hegemonic form of masculinity, whilst critical of femininities through which gender insubordinate positions are produced in sexual relations. The expression of sexual desire even same-sex desire is an instantiation of their agency although the article will show how agency too is locked into the maintenance of counter feminist ideals of masculinity (Talbot and Quayle, 2010). Ouzgane and Morrell (2005) note that African masculinities are hierarchically organized and forged through gender domination. Hegemonic forms of masculinity are constraining and are critical in the sexual objectification of women. Gender inequalities may constrain women’s and girls’ sexual agency but does not determine it. As sexual strategizers, teenage women can and do manoeuvre within its constraints. Understanding how young teenage women manoeuvre within gender relations is crucial in the pursuit of gender equality and is especially significant in the context of South African AIDS (Reddy and Dunne, 2007).

South African context of gender inequalities and HIV

South Africa has an overwhelming heterosexual HIV epidemic which affects over 5.6 million people and there are huge gender and age disparities in rates of infection. UNAIDS (2011) indicates that prevalence among young women, aged between 15 and 24 years is on average about three times higher than among men of the same age. Gender is an important factor that shapes young people’s’ sexual behaviour and expectations. Gender norms lead to young women’s heightened vulnerability to the disease. Mounting concerns about young women’s lack of agency and power within heterosexual relationships has led to an increasing realization that women who are in unequal relationships are at greater risk of HIV infection (Jewkes et al., 2006). If women had more equitable power in their relationships, as the Jewkes et al. study reports, one in seven new HIV infections could have been prevented. Sexual risk must be understood in the context of varying degrees of power within relationships and gender-specific norms for sexual conduct (Hoffman et al., 2006).

Scholars in South Africa have recognized that the operation of gender power within heterosexual relationships heightens young women’s vulnerability to the disease. The social construction of heterosexuality operates in ways that are based on men’s power over women. Even though there are some transformations in the constructions of masculinity (Jewkes and Morrell, 2010) the country remains strongly patriarchal and violence against women has reached epidemic proportions. Sexuality for young women is troubling as they face continued restrictions with an emphasis on sexual docility and modesty as an idealized femininity. As Muhanguzi (2011) shows, young African women often learn to be both compliant and complicit in idealized forms of femininity, which limit their sexual agency. Conventional forms of femininity, as Reddy and Dunne (2007) illustrate, increase sexual risk and vulnerability to HIV.

Recently there has been growing realization that understanding the sexual agendas of young women is important in order to challenge patriarchal dominance and increase their agency (Bhana and Pattman, 2011; Hoffman et al., 2006; Jewkes and Morrell, 2012; Reddy and Dunne, 2007). Breaking from the tendency to interpret young women as a homogenous group and sexually passive, new research illustrates that even young women negotiate their sexuality under patriarchal circumstances. Taking issue with the dominant conception of young women as victims of male power, this article contributes to an emerging body of work in South Africa that argues that within constraints young women are active makers of their sexual worlds. Their expressions of sexual agency however are framed under circumstances that are restrictive and premised on unequal gender power inequalities. In troubling agency and sexuality of young South African women, the article takes the view that young women’s sexual agencies are not expressive of docility neither are they sufficiently empowered to subvert gender power inequalities.

Contextualizing the study: Coloured in Wentworth

The girls in this study come from Wentworth, formerly designated as a coloured area. Whilst apartheid has played a key role in the formation of racial identities, coloured is not simply an apartheid label imposed by whites. For decades, representations of coloured as mixed, not white or black has led to negative constructions (Adhikari, 2005). Coloured identity has often been associated with poverty, immorality and sexual promiscuity. Social and economic marginalization continues to have effects for people in Wentworth.

Under apartheid’s Group Areas Act, Wentworth was officially proclaimed a coloured area from 1963. Today about 35,000 people live here and despite the end of apartheid it remains predominantly coloured. Housing here can be described as a scattering of small houses as well as cramped flats built during apartheid, as sub-economic temporary housing. At times up to 10 to 15 people live in a flat. More than 33% of men in Wentworth are unemployed (Chari, 2006). Anderson (2010) notes that Wentworth is environmentally polluted as a result of close proximity to the oil refinery, with drugs, gangsterism and HIV major areas of social concern. The community also faces high rates of alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence and teenage pregnancy. Anderson’s study of young coloured men in Wentworth show that girls who have ‘sugar daddy’ relationships with older men who can provide material possessions are treated with contempt by younger boys who feel emasculated, marginalized and lack economic power. While the article focuses on young women, it is important to mention that in the South African context, continued economic and political marginalization of coloured men arguably manifests in ways that suggest the sexual exploitation of women, as will become evident through the accounts of the young women in this study.

Research Methods

This article draws from a larger interview-based research project titled ‘16 turning 17 youth, gender and sexuality in the context of HIV and AIDS’. This project seeks to explore the ways in which young people, in various social locations, in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa give meaning to gender and sexuality. Understanding such meanings is especially significant in addressing locally relevant intervention programmes. Other work in the project using focus group interviews has looked at the ways in which both young African men and women construct such meanings (Bhana and Pattman, 2011). In this article, the focus is specifically on one focus group interview conducted with eight young school-going coloured women in Wentworth. With the assistance of teachers, young women, aged between 16 and 17 years old, were invited to participate in the study. Consent forms were distributed to the students and their parents or guardians. The selection of the young women was based on their willingness to participate, the completion of all consent forms and availability to be interviewed.

The focus-group interview (with eight participants) lasted approximately two hours and was conducted in an available room at the school. A semi-structured interview schedule was used during the focus-group discussions to probe meanings around sexuality, gender and relationships. While the topics were predetermined, the students were encouraged to set the agenda, with the researcher picking up on issues that they raised (Frosh et al., 2002). Their relationships with boys, sexual debut, sexual pleasure, desire and anxiety were part of the agenda, but not limited to it, and discussions were dependent on how and what participants were willing to express. The girls were outspoken. They were eager to discuss their sexualities without much restraint perhaps as they felt comfortable to do so within a single-sex interview environment. Reflecting their contradictory sexual positioning as gendered beings both in Wentworth and South Africa more broadly, their statements reveal agency and complicity. Such contradictions are beginning to emerge in research as a powerful way in which young South African women negotiate sexualities as both vulnerable and capable although the structural and patriarchal context in the country continues to limit their agency (Jewkes and Morrell, 2010). Throughout the article, the identities of participants are protected by the use of pseudonyms. In addition to confidentiality being assured by the researcher, it was essential to establish group confidentiality amongst the participants themselves because sensitive issues were discussed. The participants were informed that they were not compelled to answer questions that they were not comfortable with and could withdraw from the sessions if they chose not to participate any longer.

Data analysis

In the analysis of the group interview we tried to provide a nuanced and multidimensional picture of the meanings girls attach to their sexual identities. After transcribing recorded focus-group discussions verbatim, a thematic analysis was conducted. Initially we searched for repeated patterns of meaning that were used in relation to sexuality and relationships. Secondly, we used different codes to highlight potential themes, noting the contradictions. We highlight desires and agency as well as constraints and contradictions and we do so in relation to sexual desire and reputations, gender violence and the use of drugs and alcohol. We are most interested in how young women’s agency and constraint, resistance and complicity play out within the culturally specific context of male privilege.

Expressing desires

Boys and boyfriends

Boys and boyfriends can occupy a central place in the daily thoughts of young teenage women, whether they are involved with them sexually or imagining and desiring such relationships (Bhana and Pattman, 2009). Studies have shown the investments that young women have in developing and sustaining relationships that affirm their sexual desires even as they are fraught with power inequalities (Allen, 2005). In Muhanguzi’s (2011) study of teenage girls in Uganda for example, female sexual autonomy was constricted and regulated with sexual desire seen as a masculine prerogative. Instead of only foregrounding domination and power inequalities, the girls in this study expressed themselves as legitimately sexual with pleasurable investments in sex and sexuality.

Monica: I just wanted to try it [sex] … It was nice.

Lee: I enjoyed it.

Kiara: Isn’t it supposed to be enjoyable?

Tara: … Everybody’s gonna have sex … it’s a natural thing. You gonna have it one day … whether you choose to have it now or later, you still gonna have it.

Monica: Not in a car or in the park … have it in your room in the comfort of your own home with your boyfriend.

Liz: … on my mother’s bed or somewhere.

Tara: You must go book in because your cake [vagina] is very expensive … he thinks very low of you if he wants to go to a cheap place.

Sheryl: Something out of the movies … It must be romantic.

Lee: Whatever happens happens, wherever it happens.

Teenage women legitimate themselves as sexual and recognize sexual desire as a normal expression of sexuality. Not all of the young women were sexually active but together they were preoccupied with relationships in ways that contested the image of sexual docility. Having sex and linking it with romance ‘like something out of the movies’ was reflective of their feminine sexual expressions. Pleasure is normalized and expressed positively. It is possible that sexual expression was enhanced as a result of single-sex group dynamics making it comfortable for girls to express themselves in ways where their sexual reputations were somewhat safeguarded. Tara talked about foreplay and how ‘jols’ (dance clubs) offered opportunities for sexual intimacy. Tara stated that dancing permits you to ‘feel the thing [penis]’ and as Muñoz-Laboy, Weinstein and Parker (2007) note the context of dancing presents an opportunity for sexual assertiveness and the transition to sex. To argue that female sexuality in Africa is located on the side of pain and suffering erodes the possibility of understanding heterogeneous ways in which teenagers in different social contexts in South Africa are able to manoeuver within gender relations.

Desire was also expressed through looks with most of the girls desiring ‘handsome boys’. Coloured, Indian-looking mixed-race young men were regarded as handsome. Shante however said that she didn’t believe in looks, ‘people even tell me … you can do better you too pretty for him’ but to Shante her boyfriend could be the ‘ugliest boy on earth but to me he’s the handsomest boy ever’. Desire was locked into notions of romantic love, beyond looks but money plays a part in the construction of desire. Tara notes ‘money is a big part in a relationship if you wanna take it further’. In the context of widespread poverty in Wentworth, Anderson (2010) finds that young women are particularly vulnerable to relationships with older men who have money. Agency and sexual desire must be understood within the complex structural forms of inequalities suggesting that agency expressed so far does have its limits and sexual assertiveness may not find expression in actual relationships. South African research amply justifies this claim with a focus on the limitations of women’s sexual agency within the broader political economy and constructions of hegemonic masculinity (Jewkes and Morrell, 2010).

Continuing with the rejection of acquiescent femininities, Shante condemned girls who had sex during menstruation:

Shante: I think having a period and having sex. My one friend, she said her boyfriend was begging her. I was teasing her afterwards. Her period wasn’t finished and she had sex with her boyfriend. No skaam cells! [No shame.]

Monica: Those girls have no respect for themselves and if you don’t have respect for yourself how do you expect the next person to respect you?

There are contradictory processes involved here. On the one hand the girls express repugnance for those girls who give in to boys’ demands for sex during menstruation. Sex, in this framing is not negotiated, but an expression of male sexual privilege and female docility. On the other hand, the girls’ rejection of sex during menstruation must be seen within the discourses of contamination associated with women during menses (Hensel et al., 2007). Sexual activity is not suppressed during menses, as Shante asserts but having sex during this time is understood within negative sentiments of shame and disgust and a reason to stain a girl’s’ reputation. While Hensel and colleagues (2007) note that some coital activity during menses could the increase risk of HIV, the discussion here works to regulate sexual expectations and girls’ conduct during menstruation serving as a vehicle to reproduce predictable gender expectations and women’s subordination.

This should not discount however the possibilities of agency in sexual relations. Monica asserted her right not to sleep with her boyfriend of one month:

Not because I’m with you for a month now I’m gonna sleep with you shame – you gonna hang and hang and hang …

The possibility that girls have the ability to negotiate timing of sexual activity points to sexual assertiveness and is particularly helpful in reversing the thinking about African girls’ lack of sexual agency. Monica shows that she will not give in to male sexual demands. Alert to the context of HIV and sexuality, Tara continues:

I’m gonna do a HIV test cos there’s no way I’m gonna lay and open my legs without knowing.

‘Know your status’ is widely advertised in South African media as a way to address the scourge of HIV. Tara states that she needs to know the status of her partner as she imagines herself in a sexual encounter. Insisting on knowing the HIV status is an assertion of a femininity that moves away from one that is risky, powerlessly waiting to be infected. These girls state that sex was going to happen to some extent on their own terms and their assertions show greater ability of young women in South Africa to take responsibility for timing and HIV status. But, sexual risk must be understood in the context of varying degrees of power within relationships and gender-specific norms for sexual conduct (Hoffman et al., 2006). What Tara and Monica will actually do in sexual encounters depends on many factors, including the ability to translate the assertion demonstrated here to intimate sexual negotiations. So far, research in South Africa demonstrates women’s continued vulnerability in sexual relationships because of lack of power to negotiate safe sex (Jewkes and Morrell, 2010).

While attacking forms of docility, the girls contradictorily invested in an oppressive form of masculinity:

Tara: I’ll go for a bad boy that’s gonna break my heart. If there’s a good boy and a bad boy, I’ll go for the bad boy I dunno why.

Shante: Maybe it’s that feeling that you want protection.

Tara: When you finish with a bad boy you always come back to the good boy. It’s exciting.

Researcher: So what’s ‘bad’ … ?

Shante: Naughty, big mouth, always in trouble at school, dangerous …

Sheryl: Mostly girls go for boys like that there when they don’t have a father figure. They tend to go out with boys that resemble their fathers, the type of people that their fathers are and all that there.

Tara: He’s explored life … you can see maybe the boy got multiple partners he’s just that ou [guy] when he drives a car … every girl wants to lie with him so you also wanna be with him.

Monica: I wanna show the rest that I can also have him … I want the boy that all the girls want.

Whilst strongly rejecting conventional forms of femininities, the young women contradictorily uphold a counterfeminist masculine ideal. Like Talbot and Quayle (2010) who show that women uphold hegemonic masculinity in romantic relations, here the hegemonic ‘bad boy’ form of masculinity is strongly appealing. This desire for bad boys comes with knowledge that such relations involve multiple partners and ‘leave a broken heart’. Congruent with conventional forms of femininity, which are risky, the desirability for bad boys is also framed within the heterosexual competition. In the sexual playing field, Tara states that having a bad boy is an assertion of power over other women and ‘having him’ is exhibition of her feminine success and status despite the realization of sexual and emotional risk in such relationships. The appeal of the bad boy is situated within the context of Wentworth where rampant forms of male sexuality have been identified (Anderson, 2010). Sheryl situates her narrative within this backdrop pointing to fathers in Wentworth who display similar ‘bad’ masculinities and are idealized. Reduced sexual autonomy and gender power inequalities are often framed to position women as passive sexual objects. This approach alone masks women’s power and agency discounting how women’s expressions of desire reinscribe hegemonic male power complicit in reproducing women’s subordination.

There were resistant femininities with Liz stating ‘I don’t want to be with a boy that everyone wants ‘cos then I’m gonna be insecure’. The resistance is framed around feelings of insecurity confirming gendered vulnerability within relationship dynamics that impact negatively upon women.

Same-sex desires

Sexuality was also expressed beyond heterosexual desires and included the thrill and excitement of lesbian sexualities. Lesbian sexuality was given serious attention and the young women offered personal stories and anecdotes to demonstrate the ways in which same-sex sexualities were expressed, resisted and rejected:

Tara: … a girl she can understand what you go through. She’s been through it maybe and you’ve got a better communication, understanding than a boy would have. A boy you can tell him your stories, but when he’s with his friends it can be a whole other thing. For example … a boy, say we have sex, he’s gonna tell his friends that he slept with me, he’s gonna tell this one and that one … Now with a girl, it’s between you two – it’s not going out.

Against male domination and situating lesbian sexuality within a favourable environment of communication and understanding Tara talks of the ways in which heterosexuality is based on the exhibition of male power. Tara positions lesbian sexuality positively without sexual jockeying for power. Lesbian sex, she says, is ‘not going out’. Unlike much of Africa, South Africa has achieved remarkable success in sexual equality opening up options for alternative forms of sexuality. However, against the policy gains are increasing reports of homophobic violence and men, reportedly violently addressing alternative sexuality through curative rape to ‘cure’ women of lesbianism. Engaging with lesbian sexuality can be highly problematic in Africa and lesbian teenage sexualities are often muted.

At the same time however, lesbian relationships have become more accessible in the light of South Africa’s progressive sexuality laws providing women with greater sexual options albeit within discursive and material constraints. Across Africa, there are numerous kinds of lesbian relations (Morgan and Wieranga, 2005) even as such relationships have been conceived of in relation to silence, fear and tyrannical laws that repudiate homosexuality as is the case in Uganda. Against this is the thrill and excitement of lesbian sexuality:

Shante: I think it was the thrill of trying something new experimenting with something that I haven’t tried before. I just thought that maybe cos like girls know what other girls want, how they feel it’s easier cos boys find it very hard to try to understand a girl. It started as friendship with this girl on mxit. And then she starts getting like freaky … so then I got rid of the whole girl thrill thing. I decided that’s not where I wanted to be with my life.

Going beyond the traditional emphasis in South Africa, it is suggested here that young women’s sexuality can be thought of beyond domination and subordination to include same-sex desires, agency and regulation. Lesbian sexuality is both expressed and regulated. Importantly, Shante notes the shifting dimensions of sexuality, the attraction of lesbian sexuality and her decision that it’s ‘not where I wanted to be’. The regulatory environment of heterosexuality was pervasive in shaping decisions:

Tara: … at one stage … I started talking to girls and girls started talking to me and we became like close, close friends and yes I have kissed a girl and spoke about it … I thought about it and ay I can’t hurt my mother like this cos I am the apple of my mother’s eye. I can’t hurt her. I can hurt anybody else but not my mother.

Whilst sexual experimentation and sexual exploration go beyond heteronormativity, lesbian sexuality is highly regulated. Tara talks of feeling obliged to rethink her relationship based on the hurt that this might cause her mother. Same-sex desires are pleasurable investments but they are restrained, under surveillance and socially unrewarding. Whilst sexuality is fluid and changeable, Tara refers to the power of heterosexuality, through which she reconstitutes herself as heterosexual (A Allan, 2009).

‘Boys get away with a lot’: Agency and constraints

Reputations

A significant body of work has suggested that young women’s sexuality operates through a good girl and bad girl image (A Allan, 2009; L Allen, 2005). Maintaining an image of respectability is an important means to regulate female sexuality as it provides the coherence of good girl. Girls actively participated in such cultures of sexual regulation:

Shante: … boys get away with a lot. We don’t get away with most things. Like a boy can … keep so many girls but he won’t get a name. We must just be walking with a boy then we get a name.

Female sexuality is under surveillance and whilst boys can get away with multiple partners, girls’ reputations are at stake. This is not just determined by oppressive gender power relations but girls situate sexuality within the discourse of shame and work themselves into it. Girls feed into the pressure to be respectable and this is one of the key constraints on their sexual behaviour as well as their understandings of proper sexual and gendered behaviour:

Shante: If you with a boy for years, he starts bragging … how your’ll did it, where your’ll did it … ‘ooh I had her there and there’, they wanna brag about you.

Tara: They wanna brag about how many girls they slept around with and how much experience they have, yet for a girl … we don’t go around calling a boy a bitch …

Research has shown that young women who have sexual encounters are often labelled as ‘sluts’ or ‘bitch’ while boys’ sexual conquests are upheld as powerful hegemonic displays of masculinity (Frosh et al., 2002). Against the earlier assertions of power and resistance to male sexual domination, the girls here situate their discussions within the enduring logic of women’s subservient place in gender and sexual relations; their complicity in it as they struggle to achieve respect within a context of male sexual power. In the interviews, the girls invested a great deal in talking about damaged reputations, critical of male power whilst at the same time regulating their sexuality struggling to achieve respectability.

Monica: Some they … take pictures … if I took it … sis … that girl – she got a problem …

Tara: Ja, giving him oral sex and her younger sister had naked pictures and she came out with these pictures of her – one naked one and one of her vagina …

Monica: And this was with the boy she was jolling [sleeping] with. I don’t know if it was her boyfriend or not. She said … she trusted him or whatever. Like how can you trust people with things like that? She said, ‘I didn’t know he was gonna do things like that’ and the pictures came into our school.

Liz: If you know you got things on your phone, keep it to yourself.

Tara: Then you get stupid girls who do things with their boyfriends and wanna watch it.

Liz: It will take you over a long time to get or maintain your reputation and take one stupid thing to ruin it.

Oral sex, penetrative sex, erotic pictures and the use of cellphone technology are part of young peoples’ sexual cultures, connected to male sexual prowess, girls’ sexual agency, subordination and the problematization and regulation of girls’ sexuality. Critical of forms of femininity that acquiesce to male sexual domination, Monica, Tara and Liz situate their responses within the regulatory discourse based on the good girl/bad girl binary. ‘If you know you got things on your phone, keep it to yourself’ serves to highlight both sexual agency and sexual silencing. Ringrose and Barajas (2011) note that whilst new digital technology has increased girls’ access to technology they are also sites of gendered and sexual risk. They argue that whilst young women are able to mediate such risk, there is evidence that within pornified media the sexual objectification of girl’s bodies is intensified. The girls in this study reject sexual objectification but such rejection is underscored by the perceived sense of respect that girls and women are expected to uphold in relation to sexual discretion, contrasting to the expectations and actual conduct of boys. Female sexuality is thus regulated and girls’ sexual desire, whilst asserted, must be negotiated through silence (A Allan, 2009). Silencing becomes a strategy to resist objectification within the broader cycle of the reproduction of gender roles. The girls are subject to the power of enduring forms of respectable femininity but they reproduce it, regulate their sexualities and actively participate in their subordination.

Gender violence

Whilst violence was an area that obviated the ability to negotiate sexuality, some of the girls in this study took non-conforming views about it:

Tara: I’ll never catch a hiding. I’ll only catch a hiding from my mother and my father because there’s a brick there’s a stone there’s a bottle there’s a iron, there’s something.

Kiara: Wentworth – you know, we tough. We can fend for ourselves cos that’s how we grew up – to defend ourselves – so I don’t think that we’d allow boys to abuse us in that type of way.

Identifying Wentworth with a tough form of femininity, Tara rejects boys’ abuse stating that she will resort to bricks, stones, bottles, irons to defend herself from ‘catching a hiding’. In South Africa violence is often represented as a domain where boys realize their masculinity with girls rendered as helpless and docile (Bhana and Pattman, 2011). The appropriation of violence into feminine patterns of conduct reaches into the social context and it becomes a powerful resource through which girls assert their femininities. However, despite evidence of violent resistance research suggests that South African women and girls are subject to heinous forms of sexual and gender violence that has perpetuated gendered risk to disease and confirmed the country’s status as the rape capital of the world (Jewkes and Morrell, 2012). It was thus not surprising that girls under circumstances in Wentworth reported on the pervasiveness of violence in heterosexual relations.

Laura: My boyfriend … he used to swear me but I still go back to him I dunno why –I’m a glutton for punishment.

Shante: I’m a sucker for love.

Sheryl: There’re rough ones, and there’s the soft ones with the boys – she’s getting busted up comes to school with blue eyes, lips; she’ll say she was in a fight and a girl punched her or whatever in the meantime it was her boyfriend.

Liz: Sometimes the majority of the girls that get hit are sleeping with their boyfriends and they can’t leave them.

Researcher: Why can’t they leave them?

Liz: They’re emotionally attached.

Love and emotional attachments are not only expressions of intimacy, pleasure and desire but are critical in the expression of gender inequality and violence. The girls in this article collectively express desires in ways that conform and legitimate their status as sexual subjects but as Vance (1984) has noted female sexuality is also expressed through danger and exploitation. Many women may choose to see sex as a way of finding love with negative consequences for sexual well-being. Violence, as Jewkes and Morrell (2010) show, configures the lives of young South Africans and plays a major role in inequality within sexual relationships. Young women are complicit in relations of inequality, through discourses of affectivity.

Drugs, alcohol and the debonair man

Sexuality and substance use, especially in the context of high prevalence of HIV infection, is particularly dangerous for young South Africans. The use of alcohol or drugs has effects for sexual conduct and gender oppressive sexual relationships (Jewkes et al., 2006). In this part of the article the girls illustrate the ways in which their agency is constrained and restricted as alcohol and drug use play an important part in the strategies to control and sexually coerce them. The very high level of alcohol and drug abuse in Wentworth is important to consider in understanding how vulnerability is produced. Constructions of hegemonic coloured masculinity, poverty and unemployment drive unequal gender relations, fuelled by the use of drugs and alcohol (Anderson, 2010). Kalichman et al. (2007) identify the ways in which alcohol use is associated positively with women’s sexual risk and disease. The girls talked about the ways in which their power was constrained in this regard:

Tara: A lot of boys from Wentworth they like putting eye drops in girls’ drinks.

Researcher: Why eye drops?

Tara: It makes you drowsy … then he can take advantage of her … he has sex with her.

Shante: If you at the club you always have to have someone at the table.

Tara: Yes guarding the drinks.

Shante: You feel scared to move with those same people because you don’t know what`s gonna happen next.

Spiking drinks at the club is a form of male entitlement that increases girls’ vulnerability to sexual risk and coercion. The degree to which sexual agency is constrained correlates inversely with the ability to resist forms of oppression.

However, it is simplistic to assume that it was boys alone who created such vulnerabilities. Girls themselves used drugs and did so before they went to clubs:

Tara: The one who sells the drugs … we call him the debonair man because every few seconds his phone is ringing and most of the calls that come through are girls and the girls are asking for this and they asking for that and by the end of a Friday night he’s made more than … so much money.

Shante: They become dependent on it and they feel they can’t go the club if they haven’t had.

Girls’ sexual agency is not only constrained by the repertoire of male conduct which controls and regulates sexual activity through the use of drugs and alcohol, but girls themselves invest in the use of drugs as illustrated in the foregoing extract and put themselves at risk.

Conclusion

Against the backdrop of HIV and AIDS, this study highlights the importance of investigating how young girls in local contexts negotiate sex and understand their own sexual attitudes and practices. The study demonstrates how they negotiate their femininity in ways that both constrain and permit sexual agency. This they do by simultaneously accommodating and rejecting a conventional form of femininity which is acquiescent to male sexual entitlement. It is through their investment in pleasurable sex, that they demonstrate their sexual agency and in so doing subvert the dominant assumptions in Africa that position women and girls as victims of male sexuality. Much of the research on young women’s sexualities focuses largely on gender and sexual inequalities that perpetuate and reproduce passive notions of women and girls. Such a framing does not allow for a comprehensive understanding of female sexualities that include sexual desire and pleasure. The pleasures and desire that are expressed here draw attention to these girls’ ability to assert power, which goes against familiar assumptions of women’s passivity in heterosexual relations.

While there is evidence of resistance to male violence, the relative powerlessness of these young women remains ubiquitous. Ending structural inequalities that manifest in oppressive and violent ways can contribute to the strategy of ending girls’ continued vulnerability towards sexual risk in South Africa. The school can be a catalyst in this regard by offering sex education that engages with young people, specifically drawing attention to their own attitudes, behaviours and practices that place them at risk. This is illustrated in ways in which alcohol and drugs feature prominently in the lives of these girls and has been identified as a factor that heightens vulnerability to male sexual coercion, sexual risk and exposure to sexually transmitted diseases. However, these girls are not simply victims of boys’ antics but acknowledge their own complicity and investment in the use of drugs and alcohol. Schools need to approach sexuality education in ways that bring attention to vulnerability and sexual agency as well as the persistent forms of gender inequalities through which girls’ vulnerabilities to drugs and alcohol use becomes risky.

Footnotes

Note

Deevia Bhana PhD is a Professor in the School of Education, University of KwaZulu-Natal. She has published widely in the field of gender and childhood sexualities in Southern Africa. Her most recent edited book is Books and Babies: Pregnancy and Young Parents in Schools (with Robert Morrell and Tamara Shefer, 2012).

Bronwynne Anderson PhD was postdoctoral fellow in the School of Education, University of KwaZulu-Natal. She has published in the field of teenage masculinities, coloured identities and violence.

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