Abstract
This chapter examines how young girls, aged 12–14, in a low-economic South African primary school setting, negotiate sexuality. Instead of seeing primary school girls as passive victims of sexuality as much of the sub-Saharan literature on schooling suggests, the chapter focuses on both danger and desire. By drawing on elements of a larger ethnographic study that focused on how 12 primary school girls in Grade 7 experienced sexuality, the chapter uses girls’ own voices to illustrate the complex formation of heterosexuality. I first discuss how boys and boyfriends remain a central preoccupation through which desire is experienced, and how this involves affective dimensions including kissing, pleasurable touch, and love. Through discussing these experiences the girls challenge adult expectations that demand age appropriate sexual conduct based on docility. I then demonstrate that, despite their desires, girls also experience distress as they talk about sexually coercive patterns of conduct at school, and how boys are perpetrators of such violence. I conclude the chapter with a discussion of the data’s implications for addressing primary school girls’ sexuality.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Aapola, S., Gonick, M., & Harris, A. (2005). Young femininity: Girlhood, power, and social change. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ahearn, L. M. (2001). Language and agency. Annual Review of Anthropology, 30(1), 109–137.
Ahmed, S. (2010). Killing joy: Feminism and the history of happiness. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 35(3), 571–594.
Allen, L. (2013). Girls’ portraits of desire: Picturing a missing discourse. Gender and Education, 25(3), 295–310.
Allen, L., & Carmody, M. (2012). “Pleasure has no passport”: Re-visiting the potential of pleasure in sexuality education. Sex Education, 12(4), 455–468.
Ansell, N. (2014). Challenging empowerment: AIDS-affected southern African children and the need for a multi-level relational approach. Journal of Health Psychology, 19(1), 22–33.
Bajaj, M., & Pathmarajah, M. (2011). Engendering agency: The differentiated impact of educational initiatives in Zambia and India. Feminist Formations, 23(3), 48–67.
Bartholomaeus, C., & Senkevics, A. S. (2015). Accounting for gender in the sociology of childhood reflections from research in Australia and Brazil. SAGE Open, 5(2), 1–9.
Bragg, S., Renold, E., Ringrose, J., & Jackson, C. (2018). “More than boy, girl, male, female”: Exploring young people’s views on gender diversity within and beyond school contexts. Sex Education, 18(4), 420–434.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.
Carton, B. (2000). Blood from your children: The colonial origins of generational conflict in South Africa. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press.
Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Delius, P., & Glaser, C. (2002). Sexual socialisation in South Africa: A historical perspective. African Studies, 61(1), 27–54.
Drummond, M. (2012). Boys’ bodies in early childhood. Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 37(4), 107–114.
Francis, B. (1998). Power plays: Primary school children’s constructions of gender, power, and adult work. Staffordshire, UK: Trentham Books.
Frosh, S., Phoenix, A., & Pattman, R. (2003). Taking a stand: Using psychoanalysis to explore the positioning of subjects in discourse. British Journal of Social Psychology, 42, 39–53.
Haavind, H., Thorne, B., Hollway, W., & Magnusson, E. (2015). “Because nobody likes Chinese girls”: Intersecting identities and emotional experiences of subordination and resistance in school life. Childhood, 22, 300–315.
Hunter, M. (2010). Love in the time of AIDS: Inequality, gender and rights in South Africa. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.
Jewnarain, D. (2020). Beyond schooling: Primary school girls’ experiences of gender and sexual violence. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.
Koepsel, E. R. (2016). The power in pleasure: Practical implementation of pleasure in sex education classrooms. American Journal of Sexuality Education, 11(3), 205–265.
Maxwell, C., & Aggleton, P. (2014). Agentic practice and privileging orientations among privately educated young women. The Sociological Review, 62(4), 800–820.
Mchunu, M. R. (2005). Zulu fathers and their sons: Sexual taboos, respect and their relationship to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Ann Arbor, MI: MPublishing.
Paechter, C. (2010). Tomboys and girly-girls: Embodied femininities in primary schools. Discourse, 31(2), 221–235.
Paechter, C. (2012). Bodies, identities and performances: Reconfiguring the language of gender and schooling. Gender & Education, 24(2), 229–241.
Paechter, C. (2017). Young children, gender and the heterosexual matrix. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 38(2), 277–291.
Paechter, C. (2019). Where are the feminine boys? Interrogating the positions of feminised masculinities in research on gender and childhood. Journal of Gender Studies, 28(8), 906–917.
Paechter, C., & Clark, S. (2016). Being ‘nice’ or being ‘normal’: Girls resisting discourses of ‘coolness’. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(3), 457–471.
Parkes, J. (2015). Gender violence in poverty contexts: The educational challenge. London: Routledge.
Porter, H. E. (2015). ‘Say no to bad touches’: Schools, sexual identity and sexual violence in northern Uganda. International Journal of Educational Development, 41, 271–282.
Prout, A., & James, A. (1990). A new paradigm for the sociology of childhood? Provenance, promise and problems. In A. James & A. Prout (Eds.), Constructing and reconstructing childhood (pp. 7–33). London: Falmer Press.
Ratele, K. (2016). Liberating masculinities. Cape Town, South Africa: Human Science Research Council Press.
Reay, D. (2002). Shaun’s story: Troubling discourses of white working-class masculinities. Gender & Education, 14(3), 221–234.
Renold, E. (2005). Girls, boys and junior sexualities: Exploring children’s gender and sexual relations in the primary school. London: Routledge Falmer.
Renold, E., Ringrose, J., & Egan, D. (2015). Children, sexuality and sexualization. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sommer, M., Hirsch, J. S., Nathanson, C., & Parker, R. G. (2015). Comfortably, safely, and without shame: Defining menstrual hygiene management as a public health issue. American Journal of Public Health, 105(7), 1302–1311.
Swain, J. (2006). Reflections on patterns of masculinity in school settings. Men and Masculinities, 8(3), 331–349.
Thorne, B. (1993). Gender play, girls and boys in school. Buckingham, NJ: Open University Press.
Tolman, D. L. (2016). Adolescent girls’ sexuality: The more it changes the more it stays the same. In N. L. Fischer & S. Seidman (Eds.), Introducing the new sexuality studies (3rd ed., pp. 136–139). London/New York: Routledge.
Vance, C. (1984). Pleasure and danger: Exploring female sexuality. London: Pandora.
Way, N., Ali, A., Gilligan, C., & Noguera, P. (2018). The crisis of connection: Roots, consequences, and solutions. New York: New York University Press.
Weeks, J. (2017). Sexuality (4th ed.). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Acknowledgement
This work was based on research supported by the South African Research Chairs’ Initiative of the Department of Science and Technology and National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant No 98407). I would like to thank D. Jewnarain for producing the data upon which this chapter is based.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bhana, D. (2021). Desire and Distress: Girls Growing Up and Negotiating Gender, Sexuality, and Harassment in the Primary School. In: Bhana, D., Singh, S., Msibi, T. (eds) Gender, Sexuality and Violence in South African Educational Spaces. Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69988-8_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69988-8_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-69987-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-69988-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)