Focusing on children's perspectives, the book explores how they actively interpret and understand AIDS, moving beyond mere dependence on adult explanations. It highlights their role as participants in shaping their social realities, emphasizing the importance of considering their insights and experiences in discussions about the disease.
Focusing on African teenage men and women, this book highlights their active roles in love and relationships. It explores the social and cultural factors shaping teenage sexualities and examines the intricate dynamics of power at play. Through insights from focus group discussions, it reveals the complexities of their experiences and the agency they possess in navigating love and sexuality within their cultural contexts.
Exploring the experiences of teenage girls in South Africa, this book delves into their interactions with and consumption of pornography. It situates these experiences within broader sociocultural dynamics and power relations, highlighting the complexities of gender, sexuality, and media influence in their lives. Through this lens, the author examines the implications of pornography on identity and agency among young women in a contemporary context.
This book is an ethnography of teachers and children in grades 1 and 2, and presents arguments about why we should take gender and childhood sexuality seriously in the early years of South African primary schooling. Taking issue with dominant discourses which assumes children’s lack of agency, the book questions the epistemological foundations of childhood discourses that produce innocence. It examines the paradox between teachers’ dominant narratives of childhood innocence and children’s own conceptualisation of gender and sexuality inside the classroom, with peers, in heterosexual games, in the playground and through boyfriend-girlfriend relationships. It examines the nuances and finely situated experiences which draw attention to hegemonic masculinity and femininity where boys and girls challenge and contest relations of power. The book focuses on the early makings of gender and sexual harassment and shows how violent gender relations are manifest even amongst very young boys and girls. Attention is given to the interconnections with race, class, structural inequalities, as well as the actions of boys and girls as navigate gender and sexuality at school. The book argues that the early years of primary schooling are a key site for the production and reproduction of gender and sexuality. Gender reform strategies are vital in this sector of schooling.