Our member, Prof. Deevia Bhana (University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa), talks about her new book, Girls Negotiating Porn in South Africa: Power, Play and Sexuality (Routledge, 2022).
This book is about economically privileged teenage girls in South Africa and their encounters with online pornography. The book investigates, from these girls’ own perspectives, how they navigate online pornography and what this means to their emerging sense of sexuality.
In South Africa, pornography is understood as sexually explicit images and videos that may or may not stimulate sexual excitement. Defined in this way, pornography should be inaccessible for minors. However, when teenage girls talk about their engagement with sexually explicit images, they connect it to the surrounding socio-material world and their online sexual adventures. As they grow up, they form an understanding of pornography that is rooted in power relations, playful adventures, and pleasurable pursuits.
For the girls in this book, the encounter with online pornography is a normative everyday experience which is freely available at home, on billboards and television, and in magazines, books, music videos, games, online streaming, and social media sites. For teenage girls, viewing pornography is not exclusively associated with hard-core sexual images. Rather, it is an everyday experience connecting ideas, technologies, devices, gender norms, thoughts, and discourses that produce affective capacities. Both offline and online experiences and objects coalesce to produce capacities for girls to think, feel, and know sexually.
Drawing from a toolkit of ideas underlying new feminist materialism, the book argues that digital spaces are a critical site for learning, developing, and negotiating gender and sexuality, as well as for express one’s sexual capacity. Digital spaces provide a route to pleasure and a launchpad for girls to contest race, gender, and heterosexual domination, while opening up pornography to broader interrogation and critique.
Within the dominant narrative, there is a premise that girls’ and young people’s encounter with online digital technologies necessarily involves negative effects, harm, and trauma. Girls, in particular, are seen as vulnerable in a country where male sexual entitlements, harassment, and violence are routinely experienced, suggesting a rampant heterosexual masculinity that inflicts pain upon young women. Noting these inequalities, concerns have been raised about the extension of girls’ online victimisation and violations that broaden the parameters of male power to the virtual space.
In this book, I wanted to provide a real-life account of South African girls’ engagement with digital technologies. In doing so, I wanted to know how girls navigated the online pornographic world not simply as victims. Rather, I sought to provide a more nuanced understanding of their experiences and encounters, by addressing girls as agential and capacious. Moreover, while policy is clear about what pornography means, I wanted to know from girls themselves what counted as ‘porn’.
Previously, there have been only few attempts to gain such insight into teenage girls’ experiences. Therefore, my aim was for the book to provide a comprehensive account of their online encounters as they learn, discover and expand upon their sexual curiosities.
In addition, I wanted the book to shift away from the dominant frame of reference in South Africa regarding girls and sexuality, where working-class girls in poverty are the objects of a gaze linking black girls’ sexuality to deficit and risk. The experiences of economically privileged girls (both black and white) in South Africa remain silenced. By addressing privileged girls in a time of increased access to digital technologies, the book reveals how their sexuality is experienced, enacted, and encountered within online modes of interactions. This provides us with knowledge about these girls’ desire, pleasures, their online sexual discoveries beyond heterosexuality, and their critique and objection to race and gender inequalities.
Girls Negotiating Porn in South Africa is not a pro-porn book. Rather, the book interrupts and challenges the narrow and deeply embedded narrative that reverberates in South Africa and elsewhere and which continuously sees pornographic and digital sexualised technologies as culpable in increasing girls’ vulnerability to sexual violence, damaging sexual innocence and reproducing girls’ helplessness.
For too long, girls’ (and young people’s) own experiences with porn have been denunciated and, in the Global South, the issue largely remains the domain of secrecy and shame within an “underground” sexual culture where girls are left with no opportunity to talk to adults about, gain leverage from, or access resources to address what they see, hear, feel, fear and desire. As long as dominant discursive constructs prohibit such conversations, girls’ online sexual curiosities will remain hidden, forestalling any opportunity to yield insights into and address the issues that matter to them. This has grave consequences for girls, gender equality, and sexualities.
The book thus addresses a critical hole in the research with and from the perspectives of teenage girls. It widens the conversation through exploring a range of ways in which teenage girls make sense of porn, pleasure, and power. Given the very few attempts to address girls’ own points of view on this subject in South Africa, this book serves as a corrective to simplistic constructions that fix girls to homogeneous and negative experiences of online activities and sexualities.
There is need for understanding girls’ perspectives on and interactions with online porn, and the impact of the underlying sociocultural structures of power, in order to revise polarising debates based on what is good or bad for girls’ sexual development—as well as the hypnotic construction of sexual innocence. There is need for an approach that is sensitive to girls’ activities and critical of the polarising politics of protection, victimisation, and the operation of gender binaries that continually trump girls’ agency and autonomy.
The book redefines the young sexualities landscape in South Africa, consolidating and broadening the ongoing global research and debate involving girls’ access to and negotiation of sexual media/porn. It opens up the conversation about what is really happening, focusing on local and sociocultural forces as they configure in girls’ construction of online porn—rather than relying on dominant discursive and legislative contexts that tell us little about girls’ own perspectives and experiences. The overarching aim of this book is to interrupt the silence, address the knowledge gap, and contest the framing of online pornographic representations as uniformly negative, harmful, and an arena of sexual danger, which have reduced the conversation about teenage girls’ engagement with online porn as all “bad.”
To be clear, Girls Negotiating Porn in South Africa does not condone porn. Rather, the book offers a nuanced view of girls’ sexual engagements with sexually explicit materials and imagery that is non-judgemental. It challenges the polarised and binary position of what is good and bad by focusing on girls’ right to speak—on their own terms, as experts and authorities of their own experiences. In the context of policies and interventions that seek to uniformly block underage access to online pornographic representations, there is urgent need to understand and address teenage girls’ own experiences in order to inform and provide correctives to public and scholarly debate. As noted, this is not a pro-porn book. Instead, the reality is that girls come across, confront, engage with, and experience sexuality and porn in all its facets in everyday life—both in virtual and surrounding contexts. Instead of ignoring this vital part of growing up, this book addresses head-on what porn means from girls’ own points of view.
Presenting empirical evidence from girls’ own voices, the book shows how they navigate, transgress, and engage in the “underground” online sexual world, exploring their sexual curiosities, desires, and pleasures, and relating these to their relationships. I argue that their pursuit of porn as they connect online and their surrounding contexts is a key site through which their investments in erotic and pleasurable sexuality are negotiated and through which we can think of a radical female sexuality. By focusing on teenage girls’ encounters with porn, as they make meaning of their sexualities, the book reconfigures scholarship towards girls’ sexual agency and their active agency in the production of their sexual selves. By engaging with these issues through a focus on pleasure, power, and play, the book breaks from dominant discourses of sexual innocence towards a radical conceptualisation of playful femininities for understanding how girls become agents in shaping their online encounters with porn.