‘Girls’ and virginity: Making the post-apartheid nation state

abstract

Beginning with a discussion of debates about virginity testing ceremonies and then briefly reflecting on discourses about teen pregnancy, this article considers how, why, and to what consequence, the figure of the ‘girl-as-virgin’ circulating in contemporary South African mediascapes is mobilised as a resource in the production of the post-apartheid nation state. This analysis refers to, but moves in another direction, recent debates about revivified virginity testing practices. I propose that reducing the discussion about virginity testing to a contestation between two apparently incommensurate ‘positions’ (‘culture versus rights’) misses an important point. I suggest that setting up the debate in this way does not take into account how the state's response to the contestations around virginity testing, through the introduction of the Children's Act, and its emphasis on ‘abstinence’, forms part of what Ayse Parla (2001) calls the “politics of (post)modernity and its novel models of subjection, social control, and bodily disciplines” through which it attempts to assert its sovereignty over the social arena.

keywords:

• girlhood
• sexuality
• virginity testing
• abstinence education
• post-apartheid state