Negotiating sexuality: informal sexual cultures amongst young people at a township high school in KwaZulu-Natal.
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2017
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Abstract
This thesis is an ethnography of teenage girls and boys in grade 11 who are located in a
township school in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa. Against the backdrop of
major social and health problems in the country, including gender and sexual violence, high
levels of teenage pregnancy and young women’s particular vulnerability to HIV, an
understanding of the ways in which young people’s sexualities are constructed are crucial for
addressing sexuality education programmes to intervene against risky sexual behaviour.
The ethnographic study is framed within feminist post-structuralist theory and draw on the
tenets of social constructuralist paradigm in exploring the participants’ realities. The study is
based on two purposively selected grade 11 classes. The data was collected by means of
participant observations, focus groups and conversations with teenage learners between the
ages of 16 and 18 years old. The first class was a mixed sex group of 12 boys and 20 girls.
The second class was a predominantly boys’ class of 22 boys and 3 girls. The study explores the meanings and significance which the teenage girls and boys attach to
sexuality in their everyday lives; and the ways they define, position and group themselves as
boys and girls in relation to dominant discourses of sexuality. This study argues that, for
effective sexuality education programmes, we need to pay close attention to how young
people’s knowledge about gender and sexuality is produced and reproduced. In a setting where
young people are constructed as either sexually innocent or sexually deviant and where teen
sexual agency is viewed as dangerous and an impediment to the academic purpose of schooling,
grade 11 learners construct sex and sexuality as a positive development that enables active,
self-aware, pleasure-seeking agents to negotiate their identities. Young people talked about
high school years as ‘the’ time for sexual fun, sexual identity constructions, sexual exploration
and sexual freedom. Notably, young people acknowledged that their sexuality constructions
are negotiated in a context (a township) that still bear the brunt of a long history of violence,
legacies of apartheid and inequalities, economic exclusion, oppression, the dominance of
hegemonic masculinities and passive femininities. Throughout the thesis, attention is given to the ways in which boys and girls accommodate,
resist and mediate dominant sexuality and expectations against surrounding social, political,
cultural and economic context of the township. Implications are suggested in the conclusion of
the thesis with respect to sexuality education.
Description
Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology. University of KwaZulu-Natal. Durban, 2017.