ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 explores the saliency of love and sex in African teenage constructions of sexuality and begins my analysis of the complex operation of power and the paradox of teenage love, offering insights into teenage desires as boys and girls construct their identities as romantically desiring sexual actors. Through engaging in debate about the meanings of love, they illustrate its elusiveness whilst acknowledging its emotional power as a resource that brings comfort, companionship and care amidst the drudgery of everyday life. In these engagements, proof of love is sometimes sex – although that is not an automatic given in loving relationships, according to some respondents. Attention is drawn to the emotional framing through which discourses of love are made. In contrast to racialised and binary constructions of gender and sexuality, which view African boys as hypersexual predators and African girls as victims of sexuality, the chapter shows how boys and girls are actively invested in discourses of love. Teenage experiences and ideologies of love are shaped by romantic notions of desire but also by the material, social and gendered arrangements of their lives. The chapter sets the scene for the rest of the book by drawing attention to contradictory and overlapping discursive formations of sexuality, explored more deeply in the following chapters.
