Abstract
A cultural lens, which is used to explore girlhood in the Southern African context, provides insight into traditional practices like virginity testing. The call for ‘retraditionalization’ of African youth, which is enacted through controlling and monitoring girls’ sexuality, is explored. Within this context, four teenage girls from schools in KwaZulu Natal, a province in South Africa, talk about how they understand their sexuality in ways that suggest that girls shatter and then reassemble the heterosexual terrain, through hypersexualized performativity, by ‘being girl’ in different ways. These teenage girls demonstrate hypervisibility and hypersexuality, and as they resist and subvert hetero-patriarchal cultural contexts, they go beyond projecting hyperfemininty and are largely driven by hedonistic behaviour. Through the use of innovative methodology, where girls are trained to serve as co-researchers to generate and analyse data, power is creatively deployed to enter the heterosexual matrix and find sites which reveal its pliable nature. Ways in which research participants actively resist or comply with heteronormative sexuality are analysed through the conceptual ideas of ‘moments of rupture’ and ‘sustained lines of flight’.
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