School, sexuality and problematic girlhoods: reframing ‘empowerment’ discourse

Abstract

This paper draws on ethnographic research with teenage schoolgirls in Tanzania to explore the impact of education on their experiences of sexual agency and empowerment. School-based education is frequently presented within international development as a route for empowering girls to exercise agency over their sexuality; yet school itself often constitutes a space in which the same restrictive gendered and sexual norms that exist outside the classroom are reproduced or go unchallenged by those working with girls. Despite the constraints to their agency from both outside and within school, girls themselves do resist the narratives of girlhood and sexuality imposed upon them. Recognising how these dynamics challenge our understanding of sexual empowerment is key to finding ways to support girls in navigating repressive norms beyond the classroom.

Keywords:

• Empowerment and absorptive capacity
• education
• East Africa
• gender and feminism
• children and youth

Notes

1. Stambach, Lessons from Mount Kilimanjaro.

2. Ministry of Education and Vocational Training Tanzania, Education and Training Policy 2014

3. Government of Tanzania, National Strategy for Growth and the Reduction of Poverty 2010–2015.

4. UN Tanzania, Prevent Adolescent Pregnancies Factsheet.

5. Stambach, Lessons from Mount Kilimanjaro, 2.

6. Hickel, “The ‘Girl Effect’”; Cornwall and Rivas, “Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment.”

7. Cornwall and Rivas, “Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment.”; Shain, “The Girl Effect”; Switzer, “(Post)Feminist Development Fables.”

8. McRobbie, “Notes on Postfeminism.”

9. Brown, “Undoing the Demos.”

10. Butler, Gender Trouble.

11. Cornwall, Harrison and Whitehead, “Gender Myths and Feminist Fables.”

12. Whelehan, Feminist Thought.

13. Ringrose, “Successful Girls?”

14. Murphy, “The Girl.”

15. Bent and Switzer, “Oppositional Girlhoods,” 122.

16. Cornwall and Edwards, Negotiating Empowerment.

17. UNFPA, Motherhood in Childhood.

18. Sensoy and Marshall, “Missionary Girl Power.”

19. Fine, “Sexuality, Schooling and Adolescent Females.”

20. Tolman, Dilemmas of Desire.

21. Shain, “The Girl Effect,” 19.

22. Ibid.; Switzer, “(Post)Feminist Development Fables.”

23. Ahearn, “Language and Agency.”

24. MacLeod, “Hegemonic Relations and Gender Resistance,” 534.

25. Ringrose and Renold, “Teen Girls, Working-Class Femininity.”

26. Dunne, Humphreys and Leach, “Gender Violence in Schools.”

27. Ibid.

28. Egan and Hawkes, “Endangered Girls and Incendiary Objects.”

29. van Reeuwijk, Because of Temptations; Wamoyi, Wight and Remes, “Structural Influence of Family.”

30. Jacobsen and Stenvoll, “Muslim Women and Foreign Prostitutes.”

31. Cornwall and Rivas, “Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment.”

32. Driscoll, “Mystique of the Young Girl,” 293.