ABSTRACT
Within the South African context, early childhood constructions of sexuality remain a marginal topic in research and scholarly debates. This chapter seeks to advance current knowledge in the under-researched area of young sexualities. Using data from primary school ethnography that explores young children’s constructions of gender identities through play, this chapter serves to disrupt the common-sense discourse of early childhood sexual innocence. It analyses aspects of ethnographic data to illuminate the complex ways in which some 6- to 9-year-old children expressed their sexual agency as they constructed, negotiated, experienced, and policed sexuality. Overall, the analysis demonstrates how children’s sexual cultures enfolded themselves within the broader ideologies of cisheteronormativity, patriarchal gender power relations, sexual harassment of girls, and girls’ resistances to male sexual power, as well as expressions of homophobic gestures disdaining gay identities. Critical of the prevailing common-sense discourse of early childhood sexual innocence, the chapter demonstrates how gender socialisation and sexualisation intertwine in/through the “heterosexual matrix” to (re)produce “intelligible”/“normative” identities among children in early childhood.
