ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a growing concern about the politics of research and practice directed at young people’s sexualities and sexual health over the last three decades in Southern Africa. Given the imperatives of HIV and high rates of gender-based violence in these areas, much of the scholarly work and pedagogical efforts directed at young people have been framed in gloomy and punitive narratives in which sexuality is researched and taught through a negative language of consequence, illness and violence. Such emphases have also tended to reflect and rationalise gender and sexual binarisms while also reinstating racist, classist, ageist and other problematic discourses of difference and privilege. At the same time, this region of the world has witnessed proliferating interventions at the activist and artistic level that also make powerful links between coloniality and patriarchy, as in the decolonial, feminist and queer activism of students since 2015. This chapter draws on a range of contemporary artistic, performative and activist interventions in Southern Africa, both virtual and material, to argue the value of collaborations with creative, affective and embodied forms of knowledge-making, that also acknowledge pleasure and agency, for scholarly and pedagogical projects directed at sexual and gender justice.
