Knowledge, Power and Young Sexualities

A Transnational Feminist Engagement

Tamara Shefer, Jeff Hearn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000609202
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book troubles the ways young people have been constructed as 'trouble' through critical readings of the effects and impacts, politically and ideologically, globally and locally, of scholarship and practice directed at South African young people's sexualities over the last three decades of addressing HIV, GBV and other sexual and gender justice challenges.Located primarily in South Africa, the book speaks to global concerns about the politics of knowledge and transnational flows of information and practice with respect to gender and sexuality and is framed by global imperatives and analyses located in transnational, postcolonial and intersectional feminist frameworks. The key argument developed here, and explored in relation to several different forms of research and practice, is that efforts to challenge HIV, GBV and unequal sexual and gender practices among young people, particularly as evident in heterosexual relationships, have tended to reflect and reproduce (re)new(ed) orthodoxies about sexuality, gender, family and young people, while bolstering global and local racist, classist 'othering' of certain communities and nation-states, and reiterating the 'innocence' and authority of those already privileged and centred.The book contributes to critical reflexive work on global practices of knowledge and its complex enmeshment with power in the terrain of sexual and gender justice work aimed at young people.

Chapter 1 ‘Troubling’ approaches to young sexualities

DOI: 10.4324/9781003056010-1

Introduction

In this book, we trouble the ways young people have been constructed as ‘trouble’. As such, this book speaks to global concerns about the politics of knowledge with respect to gender and sexuality. We write with particular reference to research, policy and professional and educational practices¹ directed at young people in the South African context. Yet, while drawing primarily from that context, the book is nonetheless framed by global imperatives and analyses located in transnational, postcolonial and intersectional frameworks. In writing, we wish both to be particular, situated and located, and at the same time to address concerns that are transversal, affecting the many and the multitude.

In the post-apartheid era, the last three decades in South African history have seen a proliferation of research on sexualities, primarily motivated by concerns related to HIV and public health more generally, including and along with gender-based violence (GBV) – thus resonating with many global contexts. Young people, from school-going teenagers to young adults, are a primary target group for researchers and practitioners in terms of HIV and GBV prevention interventions (for example, National Progressive Primary Health Care Network, 1995; Eaton et al., 2003; Harrison, 2010; Shisana et al., 2009, 2014). Notwithstanding the clear value of such research, this book speaks to a growing uneasiness among some gender scholars about the political effects of this body of work and the programmes and projects within school, university and community that they have been informed by or have informed.

Reading what researchers have produced and interrogating current educational practices directed at young people through transnational, postcolonial feminist and queer lenses, and with critical attention to the disciplinary function of global and local knowledge, and the geopolitical processes of knowledge flows, we have increasingly questioned the underlying logics of research and associated policies and practices. Our primary project here is to critically investigate the effects and impacts, politically and ideologically, globally and locally, of such scholarship and practice. Located primarily in South Africa, but with global import and speaking to transnational flows of information and practice, the book is directed at contributing to critical reflexive work on knowledge and its complex enmeshment with power in the terrain of sexual and gender justice work aimed at young people.

We apply such a critical lens to critique current ‘knowledges’ about young people and sexuality. We are informed by diverse conceptual readings including de- and postcolonial feminism, transnational feminism, critical studies on men and masculinities, as well as discursive-material/material-discursive framings of power and knowledge that foreground materiality, discursivity and their interactions in the broadest senses. Discourses are material, are materially formed, and have material effects.²

The key argument developed here, and explored in relation to several different forms of research and practice, is that efforts to challenge young people’s unequal practices, particularly as evident in heterosexual relationships, have tended to reflect and reproduce a (re)new(ed) set of orthodoxies about sexuality, gender and family.

Before going further, we need to comment on the very notions of ‘children’, ‘youth’, ‘young’, ‘young people’ and ‘young adults’. These terms mean different things in different times and places. Notions of ‘young’, ‘young people’, ‘youth’ and the like can be deployed variously: as descriptive, ‘between’ children and adults, sometimes with chronological age limits; as political, as in youth-led and youth-centred social movements; and as analytical, as part of the specific age systems and age hegemonies (Hearn & Parkin, 2021). These aged and generational terms are contingent, not fixed, and have different usages and connotations in various parts of, for example, Africa and Europe.

In South Africa, the construction of youth and young people is similarly multiple and contested. South Africa’s National Youth Commission Act of 1996, for example, defines youth as those aged 14–36 years. As with many global Southern countries facing histories of exploitation within global geopolitical inequalities, South Africa’s population as a whole is relatively ‘young’, with youth constituting nearly 40% of the population. Young people have also been shown to be most at risk for HIV infection and other social challenges. Young people are, for example, disproportionally affected by the high national rates of unemployment, reportedly constituting 63.3% of all those unemployed in 2020, with 20.4 million young people aged 15–34 years unemployed (Statistics South Africa [StatsSA], 2020). Perhaps because of their dominant representation in the population, but also because of their heightened vulnerability to health challenges like HIV and other social risks, the category of young and youth has taken on a particular meaning in the new democracy, with its emphasis on transformation and redress now and in the future. Youth, young people and children, however defined, have arguably been significant in the national imaginary of the post-apartheid, in some ways serving as a repository for the hopes of justice, freedom and equality for all.

South African contexts

Researching sex, young people and education in local and global contexts, with emphasis on the local and transnational political effects of such research, are the central concerns of this book. These matters are examined primarily through an extended case study, at a particular time, and in a particular place: the context is one of the most powerful, yet still persistently unequal, countries of the global South:³ South Africa. Before going further, we would add that questions of context and contextualization are central, not simply to be dealt with ‘as background’, once and for all, and then moved on from. They are part of the foreground and therefore present throughout, including in spelling out the scale of those persistent inequalities (see pp. 21–22).

As we discuss in more detail in the next chapter, the 1990s in South Africa ushered in a journey of social transformation and political intention to challenge injustices and inequalities that characterized a country emerging out of decades of apartheid and centuries of colonization. We employ this case focus of South Africa over the last 30 years as a way of engaging with broader arguments and wider issues for transnational, postcolonial and intersectional feminist frameworks. Thus, while working with particular reference to research and practices directed at young people in the South African context, we seek to speak to global concerns on the politics of knowledge with respect to gender and sexuality.

South Africa is a nation-state that emerges out of centuries of colonization and decades of apartheid, literally meaning ‘separateness’. The apartheid system grew out of the previous processes of colonization, settler rule and local subordination, often deployed and justified as a supposedly civilizing and christianizing imperial mission. In 1948, the National Party formally instituted apartheid in all spheres of societal, economic, political and social life. Rigid, institutionalized racial segregation of what were deemed separate ‘races’ was put in place. This operated in terms of land and so-called homelands; institutions and organizations; and living arrangements, interpersonal relationships and immediate everyday social life. These separations and segregations did not, of course, inhibit the coerced practice of domestic servitude for many Black people, away from their homes. To effect land segregation, compulsory forced removals and relocation of large numbers, mainly of Black African people, about three and half million, were enacted. Key legal measures were the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, 1949; the Immorality Amendment Act, 1950, prohibiting most people to marry or pursue sexual relationships across racial lines; and the Population Registration Act, 1950, classifying people into racial categories, from appearance, ancestry, socio-economic status and lifestyle.⁴ Apartheid permeated all levels of society, with routine, entrenched and raced, and classed and gendered, authoritarian domination, subordination and violence of all kinds. The legacy is immense.

Opposition to apartheid, internally and internationally, was also immense. From 1987, the National Party entered bilateral negotiations with the African National Congress (ANC); in 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and elected president of the ANC; in 1991, apartheid legislation began to be repealed; and elections with universal suffrage were held peacefully on 27 April 1994. The ANC gained almost two-thirds of the 1994 vote, and has been the party of government since, albeit with a reduced majority in the most recent election.

South Africa has long been a significant nodal point of international focus, alternating between idealized, such as in the first years of democracy and leadership by Nelson Mandela, and pariah status, such as during apartheid, for current high rates of crime and sexual violence, and even in contemporary COVID-19 contexts. In this respect, it has been globally noted and locally flagged that COVID-19 and its associated lockdowns and impact on the economy have amplified existing inequalities.

This is an important context to consider as our transnational lens suggests the importance of holding in mind questions, such as how does South Africa become represented, and why is this part of the globe so much talked about – as the South, as post-apartheid, as violent, as gendered and sexualized, as gender and sexuality, as HIV/AIDS, as one of the largest African economies, as capitalist, as resource-abundant, as extractive, as emerging, as a BRICS-member, as semiperipheral,⁵ as alternating exalted and denigrated Other?

The new democracy in South Africa was real, at least in some senses, but social, economic and political transformation was and remains a much longer-term process. It also coincided with a rude awakening to a fast-growing HIV epidemic where it was immediately noted that the epidemic was initially strongly heterosexual,⁶ unlike in some global Northern contexts, and moreover that young people in poor communities were among those with the highest rates of infection. It was not surprising, then, that, together with an acknowledgement of the ‘problems’ that normative gender statuses, ‘roles’ and positionings create with respect to high rates of gender-based violence, a wide range of research and more programmatic and policy intervention on sexuality and gender proliferated in the 1990s. Much of this was directed towards young people, and predominantly located and framed in educational contexts of school and higher education.

Thus, from the beginning of this historical and historic phase, the intersections between the matter of sex and sexuality, the existence and threat of HIV and the variety of forms of GBV were many and intense. As outlined in more depth in the next chapter, these include such connections as sex experienced and constructed as danger and threat; GBV, violence against women (VAW) and violence against LGBTIQA+ persons as also bound up with the HIV pandemic and other health and material inequalities; violence enacted and constructed as sexual and sexualized; the wider relations of sex(uality), health (or illth),⁷ and violence; and reactions and resistances, not least the development of abstinence and ‘safer sex’ movements. All these intersections were also seen, and continue to be seen, through the prisms of class, poverty and age, especially of younger aged experiences and practices subordinated to older aged knowledges and practices (see Chapter 5).

South Africa in the 2020s continues to face high rates of HIV and GBV, though the emphasis on HIV has shifted, largely as a result of decreases in the rates of infection and mortality, and the material shift of ARVs being more widely available. Yet in 2018, over seven million people in South Africa, over 20% of adults (15–49 years), were still living with HIV and infection rates and dynamics continue to be gendered (Abdool Karim et al., 2020). Moreover, gendered forms of violence remain a major challenge for South African society and gender justice efforts. Claims of an endemic ‘rape culture’, as Pumla Gqola (2015) has articulated it, are by no means new.

To cite one example: in August 2019, which, ironically, is South Africa’s national women’s month, it was reported that at least 30 women from a range of different backgrounds were killed, many of them by their own partners (Davis & Khubeka, 2019). The South African public is frequently assailed by reports of young women raped, often brutally, and these sensationalized violences are of course merely the tip of the iceberg (Judge, 2017). Given challenges with reporting, the well-known secondary victimization and social shame in which rape and violence are located in our public imaginaries, the numbers of women and other subjugated people who are violated and abused, and victimized and ‘othered’ in any way, are hugely under-reported in legal or public itemization. The context of COVID-19 and the lockdowns instituted over the last two years reportedly added further to the national burden of GBV (Vetten, 2021). On the other hand, the dominant representation of COVID-19 through a militarized metaphor, together with the construction of GBV as a parallel war, argued to deflect from acknowledging the normativity of gender and sexual violence, has also come under critique (Pinheiro & Kiguwa, 2021).

For many feminist scholars and activists, notwithstanding the social and personal devastation brought by HIV to many individuals, families and communities, there was also some acknowledgement of the possibilities for bringing issues of gender justice into mainstream public spaces. This seemed and continues to be a particular imperative, given that high rates of violence against women, very often young women, including sexual and physical violence within intimate relationships and in public terrains, continue largely unabated in South African contexts. Since the emphasis on prevention and mitigating the impact of HIV immediately called for attention to the dominant organization of gender practices and patriarchal power, as did high rates of gender-based violence, a window of opportunity for engaging actively in challenging heteronormative practices was opened.

Although there is a long history of feminist scholarship and activism globally, and in South Africa, deconstructing normative gender binarisms, the imperatives of heterosexuality, and the inequalities and violences inherent in such orthodoxies, such voices and movements have been relatively marginal and marginalized. The opportunity to bring such critiques centre stage as part of a larger political commitment to gender justice was seized upon by many feminist researchers and practitioners across a realm of disciplines. Also, a wide range of other impetuses, including the availability of large amounts of mostly global Northern funding, meant that research on young sexual practices increased markedly within public health and policy-related frameworks as well. Much of this research was directed at poor communities which, given the history and continuities of racial capitalism in South Africa, meant those historically disenfranchised, Black communities. Furthermore, a large amount of emphasis was placed on what are constructed as ‘the youth’ – young people located in and targeted through schools and universities, as well as through community-based projects and programmes.

From silenced sexuality to coercive confessional

In pursuing the project of critical reflection on two decades of scholarship and related educational, health and other policy practices and interventions in the South African context, it is important to note that the transition to democracy was also characterized by a re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Floretta Boonzaier and Kopano Ratele
• Preface
• Note on Authors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 ‘Troubling’ approaches to young sexualities
• 2 Young people, gender and sexualities
• 3 Gender binarisms and heteronormativity
• 4 Victims and perpetrators
• 5 Idealized and demonized young people
• 6 Transnational and local (mis)travels
• 7 Towards alternative engagements with young people
• Bibliography
• Index