ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I draw on feminist, queer theory and critical race studies to create an understanding of South African teenage girls’ online sexual investments in porn that bring attention to the messiness of race and the contradictory experiences of excitement, pleasure, and discomfort in the production of young female sexuality. I argue that South African teenage girls’ online sexual explorations and investments in porn produce both complexities and opportunities in reproducing and subverting dominant beauty standards associated with gender and race. Through qualitative research methods, the chapter shows how online porn is an important site for the production of teenage girls’ agency and sexual pleasure. The social processes through which pleasure is produced are marked by racialized hierarchies, underlined by the legacies of apartheid, contested, subverted, and reproduced as girls talk about the absence of black bodies, the hierarchies of beauty standards in the construction of the “blonde bimbo.” I conclude by suggesting that instead of seeing online porn as uniformly bad for girls, possibilities for thinking about bodies, sexuality, race, pleasure, and desires is a vital part of girls’ online sexual curiosities and development.
