ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 addresses the question of love-as-fear from the perspective of teenage girls interviewed in single-sex focus group discussions. It expands on the paradox of love, as girls entwine love with fear, male power, their own ‘lite’ agency and pain. A central theme is that love-as-fear arises from girls’ subordinate positions within heterosexual relations and the combination of economic distress, male cultural notions of power and the construction of femininity based on male acquiescence. This process is not unchallenged, as girls express a sophisticated understanding of their vulnerability whilst strongly objecting to the structures and processes that compromise their agency. Fear of boys and men was articulated in relation to boyfriends, male teachers, men in the neighbourhood and men at home. Although teenage girls attempted to exercise agency, this was limited by acute structural and social inequalities and the pervasiveness of male-dominated gender norms. Structural conditions continue to create vulnerabilities for teenage girls in poor African townships. Whilst the chapter interrogates outmoded notions of female docility, its purpose is to demonstrate teenage girls’ understandings of their vulnerability to sexual violence arising from material, symbolic and discursive forces, effectively limiting their opportunities and freedoms and diminishing their agency, and it questions social conditions that allow sexual and gender violence to flourish.
