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Violence remains a persistent challenge in South African schools, prompting investigations into underlying risk factors and mitigation strategies. However, an under-explored aspect of this violence is the potential link between the consumption of Internet porn via cellphones among girls and boys, and girls' risks to sexual violence inside the classroom. To address this gap, we used focus group discussions with 14–17-year-old South African girls to examine their experiences of porn access via cellphones and their accounts of sexual violence at school. The study illuminates the nuanced ways in which the girls experience risks and express agency. First, the girls illustrate a link between sexual harassment and boys accessing porn on their cellphones during class. Second, the findings show how girls negotiate their sexual agency and safety through contesting sexual violence. Third, there are conflicting views about porn: while some girls admitted liking and viewing porn, others objected to it as harmful and degrading. Finally, this study offers crucial insights into strategies to create safer school environments and gender equality by drawing attention to the intersections between cellphone porn consumption, sexuality, and girls' negotiations of sexual agency amidst sexual risk in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores teenage girls' engagement with digital images on social media. Using new feminist materialism, we foreground digital images as an assemblage of materialities (human and more‐than‐human) filled with affective potentials that materialise in/capacities. Drawing from interviews and focus group discussions, we show how the production and sharing of selfies through posting and sexting unlocked new ‘becomings’ through expressions of heterosexual desirability and pleasure but also generated fear through sexual objectification, sexual double standards and harassment. A recognition of digital images as materially embodied through which unequal gender power relations materialise is vital to addressing online sexual risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by new feminist materialism, this paper seeks to reimagine existing knowledge of girls, sexuality and playgrounds by considering how the socio‐material reality may unlock girls' capacities for what is possible through play. Focusing on semi‐structured interviews of girls (aged 12–13), the paper draws attention to the playground as an 'assemblage' of human and non‐human matter that connect to illuminate other ways of being, feeling and doing. We argue that the assemblage not only creates spaces for girls to disrupt hetero‐patriarchal ideologies but simultaneously serves to reinforce them. Interventions require attention to the oppressive materialities that underpin play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractIn sub-Saharan Africa, the effective implementation of Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) remains challenging especially for teachers who fail to meet young people’s sexual health needs. In this study, we examine rural Zimbabwean teachers’ perspectives on, and their approach to sexuality education provided through Guidance and Counseling (G&C). Employing a new feminist materialist framework and by drawing from in-depth semi-structured interviews, we illustrate the assemblage of human and more-than-human elements that come together to reinforce sexual silencing and danger by elucidating three prevailing material forces that shape teachers’ approach to G&C. First, teachers place sexuality within the domain of danger and emphasize sexual risk to create healthy sexualities. Second, religious and cultural norms aggregate to place sexual pleasures under erasure while reinforcing female sexual purity. Third, in the context of sexual regulation, discussions about safe sex practices are difficult. While teachers’ capacity to engage with young sexuality is constrained by the entanglement of socio-material, religious, cultural and gender norms, the paper concludes with some reflection on possibilities for working with teachers to expand their capacities to effect change and improve sexual health outcomes for young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we draw upon a qualitative study to investigate how black teenage girls interact with digital spaces to provide both capacities to express and constrain sexuality. Following a new feminist materialist approach, we demonstrate girls' experiences of sexuality as embedded within a complex entanglement of matter (both human and more-than-human) that produce capacities, mediating what girls can do, feel or be on social media. Specifically, we conceptualize girls' experiences within a 'techno-sexual' assemblage of bodies, things, ideas, social media applications, videos and pictures to illustrate how ideals of heterosexuality are connected to an affective flow of matter that creates vibrancy, permitting capacities and constraints. Firstly, we show how girls' entanglement with celebrity and media culture, sexy selfies, and videos through digital affordances unlocked agentive capacities for the experience of heterosexual desire. Secondly, we illuminate how the assemblage generated restrictive capacities for girls who did not ascribe to heteronormative and racialized ideals of beauty through objectification and online sexual harassment. We argue that a recognition of this online micro-political space remains a vital part of gender transformative interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]