6. Indian Girls and the Construction of Boys, Sexuality and Race in South Africa

DEEVIA BHANA & ROB PATTMAN

6. INDIAN GIRLS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF BOYS, SEXUALITY AND RACE IN SOUTH AFRICA

INTRODUCTION Understanding sexualities, particularly of young people between the ages of 15 and 24, is now a growing, and necessary, focus of research in a country where HIV/AIDS is raging and which has a huge gender disparity in rates of infection (UNAIDS, 2007).1 Indeed, recent school-based studies of gender and sexuality in South Africa have illuminated disturbing trends in the ways in which girls construct their femininities that increase their vulnerability to disease and reproduce gender and sexual hierarchies (Reddy & Dunne, 2007). Such insights are invaluable for informing the strategies and design of HIV/AIDS and sexuality education programmes. If these programmes are to be relevant to young people, there must be greater recognition of the diversity of sexual identities and the nuanced ways in which they are produced by actors in specific social locations. Surprisingly little research has been conducted on how South African Indian girls construct their sexualities in the contemporary post-apartheid era. In this chapter we address this group of girls, whose sexuality has been made invisible in research partly because HIV prevalence rates for Indians are low – 1.6%, according to a recent Human Science Research Council (2005) survey, compared to 13% for Black girls. Sexuality, we argue, was tied up with the ways in which they constructed their very identities as Indian girls; it was a source of anxiety for them, but also a source of much pleasure, a medium through which they asserted themselves and through which they were subordinated. In post-apartheid South Africa race remains important in marking out social (and sexual) experiences. The girls in this study who identified themselves as Indian have emerged from families who have lived through the experience of apartheid, where cross-racial relations were not only forbidden by apartheid laws but actively upheld by families trying to preserve particular cultural and racial norms. In this chapter we show how young girls’ construction of sexuality can be understood as asserting their pleasures but also as feeding into a tyranny of conformity as they produced and reproduced the patriarchal regulation of Indian girl’s sexuality through racialised constructions of sexuality, distancing themselves sexually from White and Black boys. We show how the girls regulated and were regulated by Indian boys and Indian families. The girls emerged from Indian families where the family as a patriarchal institution still exerts a powerful influence over girls’ lives although the Indian family had to compete with powerful discourses about agency, passion and desire that the girls themselves exhibited. Heterosexuality and ‘race’ emerged (often interlocking) as key themes in our interviews, and we examine how the Indian girls

we interviewed spoke about these, and explore their emotional investments in certain discourses about race and sexuality. We conclude by emphasising the importance of encouraging the voices of Indian girls in schools, where they are numerically and/or symbolically in a minority, and developing the implications of our research findings for good educational practices which address race, gender and sexual inequalities and which are crucial for increasing girls’ options.

CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND This study takes place in the context of the heightening rates of HIV/AIDS infection in South Africa. The AIDS pandemic has led to increasing examination of what sexual and gendered identities mean and the ways in which identities interact to produce versions of masculinity and femininity which increase the risk of HIV/AIDS infection (Baylies, 2000). There is now a growing body of work which argues that sexuality must be understood within specific social and cultural contexts rather than as an automatic reflection of how people protect their health (Parker, 2001). Largely as a result of the failure to stem the rising rates of infection in South Africa, in more recent years the social construction of meanings about gender and sexuality has attracted increasing attention in education (Morrell, Unterhalter, Moletsane & Epstein, 2001; Morrell, 2003; Pattman & Chege, 2003; Pattman & Bhana, 2007; Reddy & Dunne, 2007). Most of what we know about girls and sexuality in South Africa comes from research on sexualities that are visible because they are seen as problematic (Varga, 1997; Morrell, 2003; Reddy & Dunne, 2007). Black girls have been problematised as a group with particular risk of HIV/AIDS, leading some scholars to argue that that the experience of sexuality for Black girls is fraught with difficulty and dangerous (see Reddy 2004). It is certainly important to explore the manifestation of sexualities which increase Black girls’ risk to disease and for what can be learnt about gender dynamics which fuel the spread of HIV (O’Sullivan et al., 2006). It is equally important, however, to turn the focus of attention to Indian girls,2 about whom we know very little, and to their sexualities, which have been made invisible partly because they have not been seen as problematic in terms of HIV infection rates. Post-apartheid South Africa has precipitated a school context where girls can imagine new ways of understanding race and sexuality, yet we shall show how despite these new racial and sexual configurations, the social and cultural pressures to ‘do Indian girl’ encourage a version of femininity which legitimises sexual shame and places great prestige upon the maintenance and performance of respectability and reputation. These social forces are highly regulatory, restricting girls’ sexuality as they are subjected to its regulatory mechanisms, making it difficult for them to ‘bend it like Beckham’.3 The chapter draws on an interview study we conducted which sought to explore the lives and identities of Grade 11 (16–17-year-old) students in four schools in the Durban area: a Black township school, a former school for Indian students, a school formerly for White boys’ and Dale Girls High,4 a school formerly for White

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