‘It’s not all about spreading one’s legs’

Abstract

This article explores the layers of signification and interpretive frames of female adolescents’ nuanced experiences of virginity loss in heterosexual relationships in Akpabuyo and Bakassi Local Government Areas of Cross River State in southeastern Nigeria. This study is theoretically anchored in the social constructionist perspective of doing gender, which conceptualises it as a routine accomplishment embedded in everyday interaction. Drawing on qualitative data using semi-structured interviews with 25 female adolescents who were purposively sampled, we investigate the social, cultural, and structural factors that informed participants’ sexual debut and romantic life trajectories from their nuanced perspectives and experiences. We investigate virginity-based discursive subjectivities under three thematic tropes: coercive/consensual sex, stigma, and patriarchal affordances. The results, based on linguistic evidence, show that participants have ambivalent perceptions of virginity loss and/or preservation: while some were overwhelmed with guilt and tended to align with traditional prescriptions about female sexuality, others viewed it as an extension of patriarchal subjugation of women and interpreted their experience in terms of agency and resistance. In this way, virginity loss discourses provide a prominent site for doing or undoing gender. The study recommends intervention programmes for young rural women to reduce the risk of unplanned pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and HIV/AIDS acquisition as a result of their lack of sexual competence, economic security, and educational empowerment, which have contributed to their vulnerability, victimhood, and exposure to unhealthy sexual practices.