Girls negotiating sexuality and violence in the primary school

Abstract

Girls’ vulnerability to sexual violence and harassment is a recurrent theme in much of the literature on schooling in sub‐Saharan Africa. Within this research, girls are often framed as passive victims of violence. By drawing on a case study, this paper focuses on 12 to 13‐year‐old South African school girls as they mediate and participate in heterosexual cultures that are simultaneously privileging and damaging. Set against the wider social context where violent gender relations are key to the building blocks of patriarchy, the paper examines how heterosexuality underscores the formation of femininity as girls engage with and participate with each other and boys in informal school relations. To this end, Butler's concept of the ‘heterosexual matrix’ is deployed to examine how girls navigate the wall of male power, where the ‘real’ expression of femininity is embedded within heterosexuality. The paper explores girls’ investment in heterosexual cultures in the school playground and on ‘dress‐up Friday’ to examine how gender power inequalities and violent relations manifest. In expanding the analysis of heterosexuality to primary school contexts, the paper broadens the focus of school‐based gender and sexualities research in sub‐Saharan Africa to address a neglected area of younger girls’ femininity and their active agency. The paper argues for the importance of addressing primary school girls, femininity and the power of heterosexuality through which relations of inequalities operate.

An exploration of outdoor play and wellbeing in Northern Irish primary schools

“…Children can struggle when their values and preferences do not conform to those of the gendered play area (Braun and Davidson, 2016;Bhana, 2018) Previous research supports the fact that boys tend to have larger social networks than their female peers (Blatchford et al, 2003;Rose and Smith, 2009), and with girl groups structured in a more exclusionary, closed-off manner, instances of girls appearing alone on the playground have been found to occur more frequently than boys (Boyle et al, 2003).…”

Girls, sexuality and playground‐assemblages in a South African primary school

“…The toilet space provides the opportunity to defy these logics. Girls' active participation in 'twerking', 'kissing' and 'sexual touching' signified their investments in heterosexuality as documented in earlier research (Bhana, 2018;Thorne, 1993). According to Paechter (2007, pp.…”

“…Words articulated in IsiZulu contested local cultural norms and inhlonipha (respect). This cultural practice emphasizes compliance to gender and generational hierarchies where children and girls in particular are subordinated within these asymmetrical relations of power (Bhana, 2018). Herein, any association of sexuality between adults and children is regarded as a violation of inhlonipha .…”

“…Mayeza (2018) in South Africa finds that violent sexualized practices are routinely experienced in the playground. While girls can challenge such violence, they do so under constrained conditions where gender norms and the compulsion of heterosexuality reinforces male power and re‐positions girls as subordinate and as objects of male desires (Bhana, 2018).…”

Aligning with feminism: Critical autoethnographic reflections of a profeminist heterosexual male teacher educator

“…While violence is not peculiar to South Africa and that people subscribe to violence to assert dominance to resolve disputes is a universal social issue, in South Africa violence against girls and women has become normalised and this normalisation demands disruption as Graaff and Heinecken (2017) have argued. Evidence from the South African context suggests that much of this violence against girls and women happens in homes (Kempen, 2019a) in schools (Bhana, 2018) and on university campuses (Singh, Mabaso, et al, 2016;Singh, Mudaly et al, 2015) with boys and male teachers as pre-dominant perpetrators (Beninger, 2013;Taole, 2016). Violent performances of hegemonic masculinity are of distinct behavioural concern for schools with some activists calling for school-based interventions that become integrated as an essential element of the curriculum (Bhana & Mayeza, 2016;Rasool, 2017), an imperative that I have taken up in the curriculum I constructed for pre-service and in-service teachers.…”