‘Troubling’ Politics of Research on Young Sexual Practices in South African Contexts

In this article, I reflect on the last few decades of research on young sexual practices in the post-apartheid context of South Africa. I am concerned here to critically interrogate this body of work and its political effects, much of it spurred on by a global industry of reproductive health and HIV that has proliferated in the context of the HIV pandemic and high rates of gender-based violence. Drawing on a postcolonial, transnational feminist lens the paper surfaces the problematic discourses that have been reproduced and reinscribed through this research and related policy and practice, foregrounding the way in which racist, classist, heteronormative and ageist discourses, which also serve to privilege global Northern, adultist and middle class, white moralities and normativities, have been bolstered. Arguing that these problematic politics of mainstream sexualities research are linked to the continued dominance of patriarchal, colonial logics of knowledge which are based on extractivism, representation and surveillance, the article concludes with some thoughts and possibilities for reimagining future scholarship on intersectional, transnational gender and sexual justice.