1st Edition
Girls Negotiating Porn in South Africa Power, Play and Sexuality
The book investigates how teenage girls in South Africa encounter and consume pornography, situating their experiences within wider sociocultural and affective relations of power. It focuses on girls’ online playful and pleasurable pursuits as they explore and expand upon their sexual curiosities.
In this digital moment, the book directs us to the multi-layered meanings around porn, as an everyday normative experience. The book takes on an interdisciplinary approach drawing from and inspired by new feminist materialism and assemblage theorising. For teenage girls porn is freely available to see in billboards, magazines, books, on television, music videos, games, online streaming and social media sites. Girls do not have to view hardcore porn to see porn: it is everywhere. It argues that girls’ online playful adventures are a critical site for learning, developing, and negotiating gender and sexuality. These meanings are constitutive of pleasure and the pursuit of learning sexually, but they also provide a launchpad for girls to contest race, gender, and heterosexual domination while opening up online porn to broader interrogation and critique.
The book will be of interest to researchers across African studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, youth, gender and sexuality studies, porn studies, and childhood studies.
List of Figures
Lost of Tables
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: What are Girls Learning from Porn?
Chapter 2: Block Porn and Play Porn: Power, Pleasure, and Possibilities
Chapter 3: "Dirty Work": The Politics of Researching Teenage Girls and Porn
Chapter 4: Porn Pops: "Ten or Eleven, I Already Knew What Sex Was"
Chapter 5: Porn Puzzles: Sexual Things, Feeling Things, and Unrealistic Things
Chapter 6: Porn for Pleasure: Pleasure for Men?
Chapter 7: Queer Assemblages: Girls Figuring Out Sexuality and Porn
Chapter 8: Porn Race(s): White, Long Hair, Nice Boobs, and Always Young
Chapter 9: Porn Conversations: "I’m Curious, You’re Curious, Let’s Be Curious Together"
Index
Biography
Deevia Bhana is the DSI/NRF South African Research Chair and Professor in Gender and Childhood Sexuality at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
