Knowledge, Power and Young Sexualities: A Transnational Feminist Engagement

193 Pages·2022·6.715 MB·English

by  Tamara Shefer, Jeff Hearn

Knowledge, Power and Young Sexualities
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.
Tamara Shefer is Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Faculty of Arts and
Humanities, University of the Western Cape, South Africa.
Jeff Hearn is Professor Emeritus, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki,
Finland; Professor of Sociology, University of Huddersfield, UK; and Senior
Professor, Human Geography, Örebro University, Sweden.
Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality
Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality is committed to the
development of new feminist and pro-feminist perspectives on changing gender
relations, with special attention to:
·· Intersections between gender and power differentials based on age, class, dis/
abilities, ethnicity, nationality, racialisation, sexuality, violence, and other
social divisions.
·· Intersections of societal dimensions and processes of continuity and change:
culture, economy, generativity, polity, sexuality, science and technology;
·· Embodiment: Intersections of discourse and materiality, and of sex and gender.
·· Transdisciplinarity: intersections of humanities, social sciences, medical,
technical and natural sciences.
·· Intersections of different branches of feminist theorizing, including: historical
materialist feminisms, postcolonial and anti-racist feminisms, radical
feminisms, sexual difference feminisms, queer feminisms, cyber feminisms,
post-human feminisms, critical studies on men and masculinities.
·· A critical analysis of the travelling of ideas, theories and concepts.
·· A politics of location, reflexivity and transnational contextualising that reflects
the basis of the Series framed within European diversity and transnational
power relations.
Core editorial group
Jeff Hearn and Nina Lykke (managing editors), Kathy Davis, Anna G. Jónasdóttir,
Elżbieta H. Oleksy, Andrea Petö, Ann Phoenix, Chandra Talpade Mohanty.
Recently published:
Narrating Intersectional Perspectives Across Social Scales
Voicing Valerie
Viola Thimm
For more information about the series, please visit https://www. routledge .com
/Routledge -Advances -in -Feminist -Studies -and -Intersectionality /book -series /
RAIFSAI
Knowledge, Power and Young
Sexualities
A Transnational Feminist Engagement
Tamara Shefer and Jeff Hearn
First published 2022
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Tamara Shefer and Jeff Hearn
The right of Tamara Shefer and Jeff Hearn to be identified as authors of
this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Shefer, Tamara, author. | Hearn, Jeff, 1947-author.
Title: Knowledge, power and young sexualities: a transnational feminist
engagement/Tamara Shefer and Jeff Hearn.
Description: First Edition. | New York, NY: Routledge, 2022. |
Series: Routledge advances in feminist studies and intersectionality |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022000625 (print) | LCCN 2022000626 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367520076 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367521172 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003056010 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Youth–South Africa–Social conditions. | Youth–Sexual
behavior–South Africa. | Heterosexuality–South Africa. | Identity
(Psychology)–South Africa.
Classification: LCC HQ799.S52 S44 2022 (print) | LCC HQ799.S52 (ebook) |
DDC 305.2309684–dc23/eng/20220228
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022000625
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022000626
ISBN: 978-0-367-52007-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-52117-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-05601-0 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003056010
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
This book is dedicated,
by Tamara Shefer, to Cameron, Lee and Maya, and
by Jeff Hearn, to Maureen, Monika and the memory of Marina.

Contents
Foreword by Floretta Boonzaier and Kopano Ratele viii
Preface xii
Note on Authors xv
Acknowledgements xvi
1 ‘Troubling’ approaches to young sexualities 1
2 Young people, gender and sexualities 20
3 Gender binarisms and heteronormativity 39
4 Victims and perpetrators 60
5 Idealized and demonized young people 76
6 Transnational and local (mis)travels 92
7 Towards alternative engagements with young people 111
Bibliography 133
Index 169
Foreword
Floretta Boonzaier and Kopano Ratele
Tammy Shefer and Jeff Hearn love the word ‘trouble’. It is a well-chosen word
in thinking with what they are thinking about in this book. To be sure, trouble is
more than a noun in their critical vocabulary. The two authors split the word up,
decompose it we might say, make it work, and therefore turning it into a con-
ceptual lens. Above all, they trouble the troublesome ways of speaking of young
people, charting a ‘troubling’ way to approach ‘the ways young people have been
constructed as ‘trouble’’.
There are several troubles with which their book troubles itself. One of these,
an unavoidable kind of trouble, awaits any of us who would think, or speak, or
teach or write about young people’s sexualities. That trouble stems from the fact
that having grown past a certain point in our lives, few of us, even when we
are proclaim feminism, have less and less vivid memories of how it felt to be
young, embodying that feeling of newness of young sexual desires and desir-
ability, the great promise of a fulfilling intimate life ahead, the body full of yet to
be fully released excitation. Regardless of our sexual politics, at a moment when
we would sit down and write about young people, because our own bodies have
no immediate visceral sensations of being young, we cannot fully remember the
twister of affects of being young and hence cannot animate the subject with the
feeling that attends to youth.
This kind of trouble is not a problem of only South African youth nor one of
youth of the global South, whatever constitutive specificities and agonisms this
part of the world contributes to youth identities. Instead, it is one that springs up
from the fact that it is those of us who are not young who tend to write about chil-
dren and young people and what concerns them and the kinds of fear they experi-
ences (if any) and the sex they would like to have (if at all) and what animates
their lives whether they be in Sweden, India, the United States of America, or
Libya, Brazil, China, Burkina Faso, or Finland. This book thus seeks to challenge
us who would write about the young to critically reflect how our positionings, as
adults, but also as particular kinds of adults – raced, gendered, possessed of cer-
tain beliefs, likely to be middle or upper-middle class, located in a specific coun-
try in the North or South, with particular sexual preference, in whatever intimate
relationship or not – are written into our words, into our work.
Foreword ix
The trouble is also not confined to academic writing. You could be a person of
the cloth delivering the message to the flock, a politician speaking to a constitu-
ency, a member of a non-governmental organization talking to schoolchildren or
a researcher doing a study of sexualities; it is near-impossible as adults to marshal
the affects that animate the young about sexuality as young people would. More
worryingly, the accumulation of years has, for many of us, not just tempered what
we might call our orgasmic potential, the urgency we may have felt deep in our
young bodies to sexually lose – or find – ourselves in an/others. Unfortunately, for
some of us, instead of releasing us from parental restrictions, from the verses and
hadiths of the bishop, or imam or rabbi, from the moral injunctions of our fathers
and mothers buried in us, as the years pass we tend to go in the other direction,
to our parents, the authorities, narrowing our inner lives and possibilities. What
is more, the years tend to bring with them moralizing overtones that restrain our
libidinal energy.
Indeed, as we were writing this, this moralizing adult concern with young peo-
ple’s sexualities was illustrated by comments made by a member of a provin-
cial government as school-going children are approaching the 2022 school year.
The offending message, delivered by Phophi Ramathuba, health minister in the
Limpopo Province in South Africa, in her visit to Gwenane Secondary school at
the start of the 2022 academic year included the message to “the girl child” to
“open your books and close your legs”. She also said that “some young people
have contracted HIV/Aids because they are with older people, they want bless-
ers”.1 In this respect, Shefer and Hearn draw out attention to how such adult con-
cern tilt from benign disquiet, or even aim to promote sexual well-being, towards
discipline and punishment of the young. The urge by many adults is to say ‘no’ to
young people, rather than see the world from their perspective.
What could really be wrong with a clear and well-intended message about
sex for young people? Given the high rates of teen pregnancy and HIV/Aids in
a country like South Africa and others, is it not precisely such guidance from a
woman who has ascended to a high government position that girls need so that
they too can make something of their lives? And is it not true that many a man all
over the world assume this role of blessers, ‘patrons’, Mr. Moneybags, showing
off that they have money so that they can have young women? There are several
ways in which the address by the provincial minister to the schoolchildren and
teachers could be critiqued. Many highly critical voices were in fact raised against
her what she said immediately after the article was published on social media. On
Twitter, for example, dis-ease and righteous anger was expressed about the prob-
lematizing of girls, the silencing of gendered violence and consent as well as the
burden for safe sex being placed on girls. For the sake of fairness, in her defence,
the provincial minister said “her message was not only directed at schoolgirls
but boys too” and that she also “told the boys to focus on their education and not
sleep with girls”. Moreover, she said her constituency “appreciated the message”
as they said “they were afraid to say these things and thanked [her] for calling a
spade a spade”.