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The tween is the «new girl on the block» in girlhood studies. Although the study of tween life may have derived from a particular marketing orientation at the end of the twentieth century, it is not limited by it. On the contrary, this collection of essays shows that «tween» is not a simple or unified concept, nor is it limited to a certain class of girls in a few countries. This collection by an international group of authors highlights specific methodologies for working with (and studying) tween-age girls, provides challenges to the presumed innocence of girlhood, and engages in an analysis of marketing in relation to girlhood. In so doing, this book offers a reading on these three or four years in a girl's life that suggests that this period is as fascinating as the teen years, and as generative in its implications for girlhood studies as studies of both younger and adolescent girls.
The book focuses on the ways in which gendered and sexualised systems of power are produced in educational settings that are framed by broader social and cultural processes, both of which shape and are shaped by children and young people as they interact with each other. All these nuanced features of gender and sexuality are vital if we are to understand inequalities and violence, and fundamental to our three-ply yarn approach in this book. Focusing on the South African context, but with international relevance, the authors adopt the metaphor of the three-ply yarn (Jordan-Young, 2010): these being the cross-cutting themes of gender, sexuality and violence. Subsequently, the book illustrates the intimate ties that bind gender and sexuality with the social and cultural dimensions of violence, as experienced in educational settings.
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 fin...
Primary schoolchildren are frequently shielded from education on sexuality and sexually transmitted diseases in an effort to protect their innocence. In countries like South Africa, where AIDS is particularly widespread, it is especially important to address prevention with younger boys and girls as active social agents with the capacity to engage with AIDS as gendered and sexual beings. This volume addresses the question of children’s understanding of AIDS, not simply in terms of their dependence but as active participants in the interpretation of their social worlds. The volume draws on an interview and ethnographic based study of young children in two socially diverse South African primary schools, as well as interviews conducted with teachers and mothers of young children. It shows how adults sustain the production of childhood sexual innocence, and the importance of scaling up programs in AIDS intervention, gender and sexuality. It makes significant contributions to the global debate around childhood sexualities, gender and AIDS education.
Love, Sex and Teenage Sexual Cultures in South Africa interrupts the relative silence around teenage constructions of love in South Africa. Against the backdrop of gender inequalities, HIV and violence, the book situates teenage constructions of love and romance within the wider social and cultural context underwritten by the histories of apartheid, chronic unemployment, poverty, and the endless struggle to survive. By drawing on focus group discussions with African teenage men and women, the book addresses teenage Africans as active agents, providing a more nuanced picture of their desires and their dilemmas through which sexuality and love are experienced. The chapters in the book conceptualise desiring love, material love, pure love, forced love and fearing love. It argues that love is intrinsically linked to cultural practices and material realities which mold particular formations of teenage masculinities and femininities. This book will be of interest to academics, undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in sociology, HIV, health and gender studies, development and postcolonial studies and African studies.
Being pregnant and a young parent in South African schools is not easy. Books and Babies examines why this is the case. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative research conducted in secondary schools in Durban and Cape Town, the book explores how teachers and principals respond to the presence of pregnant learners and young parents in school, and surveys the attitudes of fellow learners towards them. Interviews with the young parents themselves yield rich narratives which, accompanied by a visual essay, invite the reader into their lives as they confront the demands of pregnancy, parenting and school. Books and Babies provides a finely textured analysis of these demands and shows the ongoing need to challenge the unequal and gendered load of pregnancy and parenting, both in schools and the broader social context.
'Here be dragons' was the traditional warning used by ancient mapmakers to indicate dangerous, or simply unknown, lands. These were the dwelling places of fantastical beasts, creatures such as dragons, sea serpents, unicorns, griffins and mermaids. Throughout the ages, such beasts have been viewed in complex and contradictory ways because they embody both our fear and our fascination of the unpredictable natural world around us. They appear in the earliest myths and accompany the heroes of medieval romance and folktales. Whether as the symbolic creatures of myth, or as the marvellous beasts of medieval legend and travellers' tales, fantastic animals have always inspired art and literature. Today they feature among the many marvels that populate the alternative worlds of fantasy and the outer reaches of cyberspace. Drawing on sources as diverse as myth, history and folklore, this book explores the ways in which mythical beasts continue to inhabit our fantasies and to define our constantly changing relationship to both real and imagined worlds.
This vivid evocation of the lives of 32 boys from a Johannesburg township is essential reading for anybody wishing to understand black masculinity in South Africa Becoming Men is the story of 32 boys from Alexandra, one of Johannesburg's largest townships, over a period of twelve seminal years in which they negotiate manhood and masculinity. Psychologist and academic Malose Langa has documented graphically what it means to be a young black man in contemporary South Africa. The boys discuss a range of topics including the impact of absent fathers, relationships with mothers, siblings and girls, school violence, academic performance, homophobia, gangsterism, unemployment and, in one case, pris...
A wide-ranging volume featuring contributions from some of today's leading thinkers and practitioners in the field of men, masculinities and development. Together, contributors challenge the neglect of the structural dimensions of patriarchal power relations in current development policy and practice, and the failure to adequately engage with the effects of inequitable sex and gender orders on both men's and women's lives. The book calls for renewed engagement in efforts to challenge and change stereotypes of men, to dismantle the structural barriers to gender equality, and to mobilize men to build new alliances with women's movements and other movements for social and gender justice.
This book provides a timely contribution to the field of gender and development in the face of the looming failure of international development targets, the deepening HIV/AIDS pandemic and the increased incidence of civil conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa. The overall ambition of the collection is to question assumptions behind much development policy and practice and to push out conceptual boundaries by providing critical insights from local empirical studies that bring new theoretical configurations to specific policy and practice contexts. The chapter contributions are from African and ‘Northern’ writers who have critically engaged with the ways that gendered and sexual identities are pr...