ABSTRACT
In much of Africa, narratives of sexual risk and danger have produced a narrow conceptualisation of young female sexuality defined by suffering and powerlessness. Countering this one-sided focus on African girls as victims of sexuality, this chapter argues that theories that deny girls’ agentive capacities and silence their playful adventures get in the way of girls’ own perspectives of sexuality. Girls’ sexualities are mediated through digital media and online porn and have dramatically reworked what we currently know of African girls. By addressing South African girls—both black and white—who emerge from privileged school contexts, the chapter situates teenage girls and online porn within the contemporary digital moment in order to revise our understanding of girls’ agentive capacities beyond sexual danger. The chapter moves the discussion to focus on the entanglement of girls’ sexual learning with online porn and sexuality assemblages, and the ways in which this makes possible girls’ interrogation of gender norms, while intensifying pleasurable and affective capacities as desirable subjects. The chapter makes clear the crucial role of digital media in what girls experience and highlights their agency in how they shape the meaning of online porn.
