Peer-reviewed article
‘ We girls like pleasing boys’ : love, risk and gender power in rural girls’ (hetero)sexual relationships
Thembeka Myende, Ndumiso Daluxolo Ngidi ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-sonnet-5-5This article looks at how teenage girls in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, handle heterosexual relationships. It draws on focus groups and interviews with 48 school-going girls. The authors argue that girls' sexual risk-taking comes from beliefs that equate love with sacrifice, trust with compliance and loyalty with endurance, and not from a lack of knowledge. Girls put in emotional effort, such as keeping relationships going, putting up with infidelity and avoiding conflict, and this helps maintain male-dominated power in intimate life. The authors call for responses that address emotional justice and wider structural change.
Key points
- Sexual risk-taking among the rural teenage girls is rooted not in ignorance but in affective economies that equate love with sacrifice, trust with compliance and loyalty with endurance.
- Girls' emotional labour (sustaining relationships, tolerating infidelity, avoiding conflict) is a key way heteropatriarchal power is reproduced in intimate life.
- The study draws on focus groups and interviews with 48 school-going girls in rural KwaZulu-Natal.
- The authors identify subtle forms of resistance as well as vulnerability in girls' everyday experiences of love.
- The authors call for interventions that centre emotional justice, feminist relational ethics and structural transformation.
Limitations
Only the abstract is available, so details on methods, sampling, analysis and specific findings are not visible. As a qualitative study of 48 girls in one rural area, it cannot show how common these experiences are elsewhere.
Abstract
This article examines how teenage girls in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, navigate heterosexual relationships shaped by emotional dependency, patriarchal moralities, and intersecting structural inequalities. Drawing on focus groups and interviews with 48 school-going girls, and framed through intersectional Afro-feminist perspectives, the article shows that sexual risk-taking among rural teenage girls is rooted not in ignorance but in affective economies that equate love with sacrifice, trust with compliance, and loyalty with endurance. The findings reveal how girls’ emotional labour, such as sustaining relationships, tolerating infidelity, and avoiding conflict, becomes a key mechanism through which heteropatriarchal power is reproduced in intimate life. By foregrounding emotion as a site of political regulation and negotiation, the paper advances a relational understanding of teenage sexuality and calls for interventions that centre emotional justice, feminist relational ethics, and structural transformation. The study contributes to gender studies and, in particular, African feminist scholarship by illuminating how Black rural girls’ affective worlds expose both the vulnerabilities and the subtle resistances embedded in the everyday politics of love and survival.