Elsevier

Social Science & Medicine

Volume 61, Issue 5, September 2005, Pages 1072-1082
Social Science & Medicine

Mothers, daughters and sexual agency in one low-income South African community

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2005.01.005Get rights and content

Abstract

Statistics indicate that sexual health problems like HIV/AIDS and teenage pregnancies are prevalent among young South African low-income women. To improve the effectiveness of preventative programmes for adolescents it is important to focus on adolescents’ own understanding and experience of their sexual behaviour within the contexts in which it occurs. Female adolescents’ experiences of their own sexuality are shaped by a range of contexts: from the very specific context of their intimate relationships to the broader contexts of gender, ethnicity and social class. It is therefore imperative to adopt a research approach that stratifies groups and develops interventions that are based on the needs, interests, sexual beliefs and behaviours of specific communities rather than developing general educational messages. The current paper is part of a larger study exploring female adolescent sexuality in a South African low-income rural coloured1 community. Twenty-five adolescent coloured women aged 14–18 years were interviewed about how they viewed their sexuality. The grounded theory analysis indicated that the participants demonstrated a limited sense of sexual agency in these constructions of their sexuality. The mothers of these young women were powerful agents in the young womens’ constructions of their own sexuality and they unintentionally contributed to their daughters’ limited sense of sexual agency. Mothers presented sex as a dangerous activity to their daughters. This discourse of sex as danger contributed towards a mutual understanding that sex should not be talked about. Daughters’ deception of their mothers about their sexual activity maintained mother–daughter connections, but left them without an interactional space where they could talk freely to their mothers about sexuality.

Section snippets

Theoretical point of departure

Social constructionism is advocated to be the theoretical perspective that accommodates and enhances the diversity of human sexuality (Tiefer, 1995; Vance, 1992; Weeks, 1986; Wyatt, 1994). Although social constructionism is not a homogeneous and singular framework, most social constructionist sexuality researchers (e.g., Kelly & Kalichman, 1995; MacPhail & Campbell, 2001; Shefer, Strebel, & Foster, 2000; Tiefer, 1995; Tolman et al., 2003; Vance, 1992; Weeks, 1986) align themselves with the

Findings and discussion

As mentioned above, one of the most important findings of the current study was that when the adolescent participants in this study talked about sex and sexuality, they included their mothers in their stories. In this article the focus is on HOW this particular group of adolescent girls represented their mothers’ impact on their sexual behaviour; i.e., what were the explicit and implicit messages that they received from their mothers about sex and sexuality, and how did they respond to these

Conclusion

In the above section it was argued that mothers can contribute in powerful ways to their daughters’ limited sexual agency. In their communications about sex, mothers’ construed sex as being dangerous for young women, something that they do not want to hear about. However, they also indicated that it is a topic they expect their daughters to talk to them about. Daughters responded to these double messages by not disclosing any aspect of their sexuality to their mothers, denying the sexual

Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by the Human Sciences Research Council (South Africa) and the Harry Crossley Fund. The authors would also like to thank the young women who were willing to share their stories with us and who thus made this research possible.

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    The authors are mindful of the fact that the use of racial categories in South African scholarship is controversial: such categories are socially constructed and carry important social meanings (Swartz, Gibson, & Gelman, 2002). Leading South African psychological researchers (see for instance Shefer et al., 2000; Swartz et al., 2002) have argued that the use of such categories in social research is important in that it serves to highlight the impact that Apartheid had on specific groups of people. In this paper the category of “black” will be used to refer to all South Africans disenfranchised under Apartheid. The category “Coloured” is used to refer to South Africans said to be of diverse and mixed racial origins.

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