Sexuality, gendered identities and exclusion: the deployment of proper (hetero)sexuality within an HIV-prevention text from South Africa

Abstract

HIV prevention discourses concern lives, the protection of bodily rights and people's active involvement in the policies and programmes that affect them. HIV prevention discourses also create lives, relying upon the deployment of normative sexual identities at the same time as they invite complex and fluid youth identities to embody the norms of prevention. This paper examines a particular HIV prevention text that is available to teachers in the Western Cape province of South Africa to support the implementation of the national Life Orientation programme. Rather than considering this text as a neutral ‘scaffold’ upon which teachers and students add cultural meanings, it is important to interrogate the ways in which texts rely upon and reiterate particular discursive constructions of the youth sexual subject. This paper argues that the text deploys a particular discursive framework in order to construct a ‘normal’ (and hetero) sexuality that validates, rather than questions, social constructions of masculine privilege within heterosexuality. This is achieved through the deployment of a scientific expertise of sexuality; the mobilisation of a valued hetero/homosexual binary to create a ‘safe’ heterosexuality; the normalisation of bourgeois sexuality through the ideology of marriage; and the naturalisation of heterosexual masculine and feminine identities.