Talking about sex: the discourses of loveLife peer educators in South Africa

Abstract

loveLife is a high profile, expensive and controversial nationwide awareness and prevention campaign that has been addressed at young South Africans since 1999. This paper examines the discourses 20 Black youths used to narrate their involvements, satisfactions and difficulties as peer educators. The primary data sources are individual interviews with the peer educators along with a review of printed materials in English and visits to one loveLife Y‐Centre in KwaZulu‐Natal and to the loveLife provincial office in Durban. The analysis develops four themes in the talk of the groundBreakers: knowledge and self‐knowledge, personal development, generational conflict with parents over talking about sex and poverty. These themes are discussed in relation to broader discourses on representations of youth, the pushes and pulls of modernity and tradition, agency and dependency.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the support for this research provided by a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant, for which she is grateful. She also thanks the editors of this special issue and the reviewers for their interest and comments.

Notes

1. Posel (2004) notes these examples: ‘Christians of Standerton and Sakile, along with the Torah Academy Jewish School in Johannesburg, lodged complaints with the Advertising Standards Authority objecting to the alleged sexual explicitness of loveLife billboards as “unsuitable” for schoolchildren’ (p. 63).

2. In understanding loveLife as part of a broader set of incitements to talk about sex, I draw heavily on the brilliant and wide‐ranging analysis of Posel (2004). The present paper aims to build on her thinking.

3. Gilbert’s point about the pleasure in the play of multiple meanings is illustrated in Nguyen’s chapter, which details, in part, the ‘pleasure and power’ of sexual gossip.

4. For additional theoretical and methodological comments about imagined barriers in researching youth and sexuality, see Pattman (2005).

5. For further information on contemporary economic and gender relations in Mandeni, see Hunter (2004, p. 128).

6. All the GBs names are pseudonyms.

7. In order to understand GBs talk about loveLife, I locate their comments within broader discursive contexts in contemporary South Africa, as I interpret them. My outsider status makes these suggestions noticeably partial, positioned and fraught with additional politics. Nevertheless, loveLife, youth, and sexuality education in the time of AIDS are important enough and big enough to allow for many disparate ‘contributions’ and, in that spirit, they are offered. There is much to admire in loveLife as portrayed by these 20 GBs. As other scholars recognize, the GBs may gain the most from loveLife’s peer education efforts, and they are obviously articulate, well‐informed and enthusiastic. Given its highly politicized profile, any research on loveLife will be scrutinized for whether it offers support or criticism of its efforts. I offer a discursive analysis, which attempts, in part, to make conscious those incitements to valorize and/or condemn loveLife.

8. This analysis builds on comments from Claudia Mitchell about the ‘romance of youth activists’, for which I am grateful.