ABSTRACT
In South Africa, sexuality and its association with young children in the Foundation Phase (FP), Grade R-3 (aged 5–9 years old), is often fraught with tensions. While subjects such as Life Skills in the FP aim at providing young children with the necessary knowledge in making healthier choices, sexuality remains largely invisible from teaching; this undermines young children’s capacities for learning sexuality while reinforcing it as a secret dimension of social life. This chapter contributes to an understanding of FP teachers’ perspectives of young children and their association with sexuality as embedded within socio-material reality. The concept of assemblage is put to work in addressing how FP teachers entangle with matter in both human and nonhuman forms to produce meanings of sexual identity in young children. Drawing from semi-structured interviews, the findings illuminate how the assemblage produces capacities in teachers that serve to silence young children’s enactment with sexuality while reinforcing dominant discourses of childhood sexual innocence. Contradictorily, the assemblage revealed how teachers’ encounters with young children’s engagement in sexualised practices interrogated an idealised childhood. Interventions to address teachers’ perspectives of sexuality in young children require a relational approach at the level of the assemblage.
