ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 explores the conundrum of love and money. It draws attention to the social construction of masculinity and femininity and how these are shaped by teenagers’ aspirations regarding love and money. It shows how teenagers’ ideologies of love are entangled with gender and cultural norms and relations of power. Teenage girls’ desire for money and gifts both constitutes and is an expression of love, whilst virginity status is a key means through which teenage boys negotiate their own powerlessness in the economic sphere. Teenagers’ desires are strategically positioned as they negotiate poverty and economic marginalisation. Teenage girls’ ideals of love are tied to their middle-class lifestyle aspirations, and therefore love is inseparable from older men who could fulfil these material desires. Upholding ‘provider masculinity’ as desirable is a strategic means to access money, fashionable clothes and prestige. Unlike teenage girls, teenage boys’ investments in love are focused on farm girls from rural KwaZulu-Natal, where female subservience to cultural norms and respectable femininity are idealised. Farm girls are seen as chaste virgins, the epitome of Zulu femininity and cultural values, and as having little interest in commodification. Farm girls are a strategy through which the economic marginalisation teenage boys experience in the township, juxtaposed with township girls’ desire for money, is ameliorated.
