PiE 2015 Volume 33 Issue 2

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http://hdl.handle.net/11660/2635

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Browsing PiE 2015 Volume 33 Issue 2 by Author "Shefer, Tamara"

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    ‘And I have been told that there is nothing fun about having sex while you are still in high school’: dominant discourses on women’s sexual practices and desires in Life Orientation programmes at school
    (Faculty of Education, University of the Free State, 2015) Shefer, Tamara; Ngabaza, Sisa
    Young women’s sexuality is a contested terrain in multiple ways in contemporary South Africa. A growing body of work in the context of HIV and gender-based violence illustrates how young women find it challenging to negotiate safe and equitable sexual relationships with men, and are often the victims of coercive sex, unwanted early pregnancies and HIV. On the other hand, young women’s sexuality is also stigmatised and responded to in punitive terms in school or community contexts, as is evident in research on teenage pregnancy and parenting in schools. Within both these bodies of work, women’s own narratives are missing, as well as their agency and a positive discourse on female sexuality. Female desires are absent in heteronormative practices and ideologies, as pointed out by feminist researchers internationally. A body of work on young women who parent at school has shown that a key component of the moralistic response to women’s sexuality hinges on the way in which childhood, adolescence and adulthood are popularly understood, together with dominant notions of masculinity and femininity within heteronormative and middle-class notions of family. Such discourses are also salient in the responses and understandings of sexuality education in Life Orientation, particularly the way in which young women are represented. This paper draws from qualitative research conducted with teachers, school authorities and young people on sexuality education in the Life Orientation programme at schools in the Western and Eastern Cape. Key findings reiterate disciplinary responses to young women’s sexuality, often framed within ‘danger’ and ‘damage’ discourses that foreground the denial of young women’s sexual desire and practices within a framework of protection, regulation and discipline in order to avoid promised punishments of being sexually active.
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    ‘I could have done everything and why not?’: young women’s complex constructions of sexual agency in the context of sexualities education in Life Orientation in South African schools
    (Faculty of Education, University of the Free State, 2015) Kruger, Lou-Marie; Shefer, Tamara; Oakes, Antoinette
    Progressive policies protecting women’s rights to make reproductive decisions and the recent increase in literature exploring female sexual agency do not appear to have impacted on more equitable sexual relations in all contexts. In South Africa, gender power inequalities, intersecting with other forms of inequality in society, pose a challenge for young women’s control over their sexual and reproductive health. The article focuses on a group of young Coloured South African women’s understandings of their sexual agency, in an attempt to explore how it is explicitly and implicitly shaped by school Life Orientation (LO) sexuality programmes. We found young women constructed their agency as simultaneously enabled and constrained in complex ways: on the one hand, the explicit communication was that they should have agency and take responsibility for themselves sexually, whereas the implicit communication seemed to convey that what they really thought and felt about sex and sexuality was not important. In addition, heteronormative gender roles, in which men are assumed to take the lead in sexual matters, appear to be reproduced in LO sexuality education messages and further complicate young women’s constructions of their sexual agency. The implications of these findings for LO sexuality programmes are discussed.
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    Life Orientation sexuality education in South Africa: gendered norms, justice and transformation
    (Faculty of Education, University of the Free State, 2015) Shefer, Tamara; Macleod, Catriona
    Abstract not available