Girls Negotiating Porn in South Africa : Power, Play, and Sexuality

This book investigates how teenage girls in South Africa encounter and consume pornography, situating their experiences within wider sociocultural and affective relations of power. Whereas many discussions of pornography are preoccupied with teenage girls as passive and vulnerable, this book argues in favour of a more capacious view of teenage girls, alert to their agency. Drawing on extensive qualitative research amongst upper income black and white 14-18-year-olds, the book demonstrates that these interactions with online porn are a critical site for girls to learn, develop, and negotiate diverse meanings of power, gender, sexuality, and relationships. The book uses the term 'play' to illustrate girls' sexual agency, feelings, and desires as they navigate the online sexual world in ways that permit a level of freedom, exploration, pleasures, adventures, connections, and discoveries of sex, sexualities, bodies, and identities. Drawing on theory from across critical sexualities and race studies, post structural feminism, and queer theorizing, the book resists taking either a pro- or anti-porn stance, instead arguing that teenage girls' engagement with online porn is in contradictory, nuanced and complex. With important insights both for South Africa and beyond, this book will be of interest to researchers across African studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, youth gender and sexuality studies--

Author: Deevia Bhana

Publisher: Routledge

Publication Date: Aug 26, 2024

Number of Pages: NA pages

Language: English

Binding: Paperback

ISBN-10: 1032028920

ISBN-13: 9781032028927