Slaying, twerking and bounded becomings: Teenage girls’ digital sexual assemblages in South Africa

Abstract

In South Africa, sexual danger dominates research with teenage girls. This article shifts this focus by examining how teenage girls actively shape their sexual cultures through social media within digital sexual assemblages. Drawing on arts-based collage-making and focus group discussions with 15- to 18-year-old black South African girls, the article analyses how practices of slaying, selfie production, twerking and engagement with celebrity cultures produce heterosexual desirability. These practices open possibilities for reconfiguring normative femininities. However, girls’ becomings are constrained through racialised beauty ideals, body-shaming, sexual double standards and heteropatriarchal norms that intensify self-surveillance and embodied vulnerability. The article shows how girls’ digital sexual cultures are embroiled within ongoing tensions between capacity and constraint, where expressions of sexuality are both enabled and foreclosed. It argues for the importance of creative, arts-based engagements that move beyond risk-based frameworks to address the material, affective and structural conditions shaping girls’ gendered and sexual lives.