The power of love: Young South Africans re-conceptualising love and sexual relationships

Abstract

abstract The degradation of African sexuality, through the construction of African bodies as objects of symbolic and substantial violence and crime, and African people as sexually permissive and sexually immoral, has been a persistent feature of numerous scholarly works. The era of HIV and AIDS has strengthened the bleak African sexuality discourse, by underscoring the danger of sex in Africa. This Article seeks to de-legitimise the subjugation of African sexuality by exploring the sexual realities of young South Africans. Theoretical and conceptual constructs from feminism, and romantic and confluent love, were engaged with to generate insights about youthful love, desire and sex. An innovative, qualitative methodology, whereby young people were enabled to generate interview data from other young people, thereby reducing the power differentials between the researchers and the research participants, was employed. The findings revealed that young South Africans who participated in this study transcended hetero-patriarchal boundaries by demanding sexual autonomy. They disrupted traditional patterns of gender imbalances, which are inherent in the notion of romantic love. These young South Africans in love did not give primacy to the permanence of relationships and did not pursue the idea of a partner who would transform “me” into “we” (Giddens, 2006: 62). Instead, they actively embraced the liberating quality of passionate love, by engaging in confluent love, as a route towards sexual freedom, and consequently, constructed their sexuality autonomously.