British Educational Research Journal

Introduction

Girls’ vulnerability to sexual violence and harassment is a recurrent theme in much of the literature on schooling in sub‐Saharan Africa (Mirembe & Davies, 2001; Dunne, 2007; Bajaj & Pathmarajah, 2011; Muhanguzi, 2011; Humphreys, 2013; Iyer & Aggleton, 2013; Parkes, 2015; Porter, 2015; DeJaeghere, 2016). Hegemonic masculinity, and ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ especially in the context of acute economic stress and violence, dramatically reduces girls’ agency, calling into question the role of schools in promoting empowering femininities (Leach et al., 2014). In South Africa, the setting for this study, girls’ reduced autonomy, especially in the context of structural inequalities, poverty and violence, has received widespread attention (Parkes, 2015; Bhana, 2016). Questions about masculinity and its complex association with the effects of apartheid, race, age and sexuality, as well as the socio‐economic and cultural conditions under which it is experienced, have become pivotal to the debate about how to address unequal relations of power (Ratele, 2016). Although links between masculinity, race, class and violence have long been recognised (Connell, 1995), this association in South Africa has recently faced increased challenge, especially as it is African men in impoverished contexts who have become the object of attention and have been pathologised (Bhana & Pattman, 2009). The principal argument here is that men living in the margins of South African society have become the repository for violence. This focus does not capture relational dynamics in the construction of gender, the variations in masculinity as well as the problematisation of femininity. Indeed, with concerns about male violence, the attention paid to the theorisation of femininity has been minimal (see Reddy & Dunne, 2007 and Jewkes & Morrell, 2012 as exceptions), with girls often constructed as victims and passive recipients of male power. In this debate, younger children have for the most part been invisible and, where such research exists, it is boys and the performance of violent heterosexual masculinity that features, especially in school‐based research (Bhana, 2016). In light of the relational context of gender, addressing femininities and girls’ investment in heterosexual cultures is necessary to widen and problematise inequalities and violence. A consideration of younger girls’ femininity and sexuality may challenge the reproduction of gender, race and class constructs that position girls as passive recipients of violence. More specifically, in this paper the obfuscation of childhood as a gender‐free/asexual arena is problematised. In pursuing this task, this paper argues for the importance of addressing primary school girls, anchored in social and cultural settings, to show how femininity comes up against the ‘wall of patriarchy’ (Gilligan, 1990) through which heterosexuality is actively shaped and operates.

In order to advance this argument, the paper draws attention to the ways in which 12 to 13‐year‐old South African girls mediate, resist and participate in heterosexual cultures that are simultaneously privileging and damaging. Set against the wider social context where violent gender relations are key to the building blocks of patriarchy, the paper examines how heterosexuality underscores the formation of femininity as girls engage with and participate with each other and boys in informal school interactions. To this end, Butler's (1990) concept of the ‘heterosexual matrix’ is deployed to examine how girls navigate the wall of male power, where the ‘real’ expression of femininity is embedded within heterosexuality (Renold, 2005; Jackson & Scott, 2010). The paper explores girls’ investment in and their ambiguous relationship with heterosexual cultures in the school playground and on ‘dress‐up Friday’ to highlight Butler's (1990) heterosexual matrix, through which gender power inequalities are manifest (Renold, 2005; Paechter, 2017). On ‘dress‐up Friday’ children are allowed to wear casual clothes and whilst it may be seen as a dress‐down from the formal school uniform, girls’ investment in fashioning heterosexuality is key to ‘dressing up’ on Fridays. In expanding the analysis of heterosexuality to primary school contexts, the paper broadens the focus of school‐based gender and sexualities research in sub‐Saharan Africa to address a neglected area of younger girls’ femininity and agency. The next part of the paper focuses on the theoretical scope of the paper.

Understanding young femininities

In order to understand how the gender relation of power operates, the paper draws from Connell (2012) and Butler (1990) to illuminate girls’ active agency in the construction of heterosexual femininities. Connell (2012) suggests that relationships are complex and involve a patterned notion of what it means to be a boy or a girl, based on power. The everyday social practices at school are important to understand the patterned operation of power. These patterns, as Connell (2012: 1677) illustrates, ‘are generally known to social actors (they are energetically learnt by children)’. These patterns are also shaped by race, class and age relations and interact with gender, which means that in different social and cultural settings, different patterns are available through which power is exercised. Whilst Connell (2012) is a major proponent of masculinity theories, the term ‘emphasised femininity’ (Connell, 1987) was developed to explain patterns of power, and girls’ compliance with and submission to male power. Girls are often complicit in the unequal patterning of gender relations, yielding to male power and tacitly accepting the dominant logic of male entitlement and control (Jewkes & Morrell, 2012). Emphasised femininity is not produced through a linear process of power: girls regulate and are regulated by discourses that sanction emphasised femininity as the ideal norm. Girls negotiate gender relations, even when they are young and in primary school, and these relations are sexualised.

Following Butler (1990), the dichotomous position between male and female creates distinctions between femininity and masculinity that are naturalised, such that heterosexual desire is expected between men and women. In other words, gender is intimately tied to heterosexuality, where to be a normal girl and conform to acceptable femininity involves the projection and presentation of sexual investments in boys. Butler's (1990) conceptualisation of heterosexuality is useful in this study, as many other studies in the West on primary schools have shown (Paechter, 2007, 2017). These studies suggest that gender is made intelligible through masculinity and femininity as oppositional, involving relations of power that are defined through the naturalisation of heterosexuality and the expression of desire for the opposite sex. The demonstration of heterosexual desire and interest in girls is thus masculinity‐making, whilst for girls this involves the performance of emphasised femininity, accommodating the desires of boys. This process is fraught with tension and ambiguity, especially as younger children are expected to be both innocent of sexuality and presumed heterosexual at the same time. Age is a key marker of gender and sexual relations. The performance of sexuality is thus caught up in a nexus that demands sexual passivity and girls’ sexual innocence in particular, whilst upholding heterosexual norms. Key to the performance of gender and sexuality is active agency.

In this study, the girls come from households where income is often derived from cheap unskilled labour and social grants. Complex factors related to socio‐economic context, deep‐rooted ideas about gender and cultural norms intersect to produce gender power inequalities. Girls’ enactment of femininities, as much of the literature in sub‐Saharan Africa has illustrated (Leach et al., 2014; Parkes, 2015), is in tension with their broader social worlds, where poverty, structural inequalities and male power coalesce to define and shape their lives. In South Africa, the ability of girls to negotiate and exercise agency must not be romanticised. Evidence suggests that there are strong cultural and gender norms that frown upon girls’ exercise of power (Bhana, 2016). Amidst the broader environment of sexual and gender violence and girls’ vulnerability, the question of agency is troubling, especially when the privileged agency of boys is taken for granted.

The ability to exercise agency is deeply connected to the wider social and cultural environment. As Bajaj and Pathmarajah (2011), Porter (2015) and others (Campbell & Mannell, 2016) note of women, girls and agency‐developing contexts, structural conditions hinder the ability to exercise agency. Structural inequalities do not determine agency, however they do provide limits to the exercise of agency. Bajaj and Pathmarajah (2011) suggest, in their study of boys and girls in low‐income countries, that boys have better potential to alter norms outside the classroom. The privileging of boys’ agency and the lack of girls’ ability to challenge gender norms, as these authors affirm, require attention to the larger social, cultural and material realities through which agency is both expressed and thwarted. This does not imply that girls cannot act in low‐income contexts. Rather, the ability of girls to exercise power is constrained by the conditions under which they are located. Girls do have a choice, however. The axes of power in relation to age, race, sexuality and class map a particular route, whilst closing down other pathways (Mirembe & Davies, 2001; Campbell & Mannell, 2016).

Within a framework that understands femininity as resisting of male power and accommodating of heteronormative and gendered environments, girls are not simply subordinate but have the power to support, are complicit in and contest such power. The approach outlined here, which stresses girls’ agency whilst forefronting the different contexts in which the materiality of gender and sexuality might occur, is useful to understand how femininity is shaped and operates within the school environment. Following this line of thinking, I argue that research with younger girls and femininity must not start with passivity and victimhood, although these remain important dimensions of concern, but focus on detailed analysis of the different performance of femininity in different settings. Doing so leaves open possibilities to examine not only the enactment of agency, but far more nuanced versions of femininity that are caught in and contesting of idealised heterosexual femininity within the particular social context. To underline the importance of the intimate relationship between gender and sexuality within a local setting, the rest of the paper illuminates the heteronormative cultures within which girls express femininity, as they resist and maintain counter‐feminist gendered ideals.

Methods

The purpose of this research was to examine the ways in which gender and sexuality are experienced by boys and girls at school. Of concern are the ways in which gender power inequalities are manifest in the experience of sexuality. The study forms part of a larger case study research project that sought to examine, from the children's own point of view, what matters to them in their relations with boys and girls at school. The study sought to capture the discursive production of gender and sexuality, using focus group discussions and individual interviews. In line with other research, the project sought to examine how schools produce gender and sexuality as key sites where inequalities, violence and sexual harassment are played out (Mirembe & Davies, 2001; Renold, 2005; Bhana, 2016; Paechter, 2017).

In this paper, I focus on 13 girls who are located in a black low‐economic township setting. They are between 12 and 13 years old and in their final year of primary schooling. The girls were selected from four grade 7 classes in the school. Whilst boys were included in the study, attention is given in this paper to the performance of femininity and sexuality. Boys are the focus of attention of other work in this project (Bhana, 2016). Six focus group discussions and 10 individual interviews were the main methods used in this case study, and were conducted by a research assistant trained in (and with experience of) working with young people. Interviews were held twice weekly over a three‐month period, lasting about 45 minutes. Each focus group comprised four to six participants. Questions probed girls’ experiences of schooling and they were consistently allowed to raise matters that they thought were important to the question of friends, boys and girls at school. Their responses were triggered by questions such as ‘Do you like school? Who are your friends? What do you do during the break? What games do you play? Do you have a boyfriend? Do you know girls that have a boyfriend? Are you friends with the boys?’ This format allowed for the development of child‐centred research, where children's own voices and perspectives on the matter were seen to be important. The study was reviewed and approved by the University Humanities and Social Science Ethics Committee. Pseudonyms are used for all individuals in this study. After all data was recorded, thematic analysis was carried out (Creswell, 2003). Accounts were unpacked as girls, sexuality and the school playground and ‘dress‐up Friday’. These categories demonstrate the heteronormative environment within which femininity was produced and through which girls accounted for the gender power inequalities and negotiated sexuality.

‘It's mostly the boys’: Girls negotiating femininity in the playground

Girls’ playground cultures reflect and reproduce heterosexuality as they actively invest in normative sexualities through which gender power relations are sustained (Paechter, 2017). Within gender relations, girls are expected to be docile and passive whilst boys adopt the role associated with being rough, tough and powerful. The school playground is an active site for the production of gender relations of power, where femininity and masculinity are produced and contested (Huuki & Renold, 2015; Rönnlund, 2015; Mayeza, 2016; Paechter, 2017). The girls in this study talked about the playground as an exciting place to have fun, play hopscotch, eat and share their lunch, but they also reproduced the dominant discourse through which passive femininity was produced in relation to boys’ domination in the field:

In sustaining the gender binary, boys are constructed as rough, kicking, hitting, fighting and wrestling, and girls are accorded the passive status of sitting, talking or playing netball. Beyond a simplistic analysis of the gender binary, however, is the need to understand the particular harmful environment where masculine domination and girls’ strategic manoeuvring to avoid the ‘violence’ of boys must be situated. Violence was physical, verbal and sexualised. Through consolidating peer group relations, girls forged their own safe space within an environment that was ‘mostly’ shaped by boys. In so doing, a softer, gentler femininity was produced in stark contrast to the kicking masculinity described above. This production of femininity is deeply tied to girls’ ability to discern and make sophisticated choices on how to perform femininity, especially as they were afraid of being harmed by the boys. But there is also a material reality to this performance of femininity, and that is the fear of losing their lunch to ‘rough’ boys. Almost all of the girls addressed the highly charged gendered environment in which boys, by virtue of their size, bodies and the production of dominant masculinity, could physically grab a girl's only meal at school. The fear of losing their lunch, and therefore the avoidance of boys, is entwined within girls’ everyday material realities and thus the performance of femininity. These realities are governed by food insecurity, unstable households, underemployed and unemployed adults and male power that mark their daily experiences. This points to the economic and social roots of girls’ fear of losing their lunch in the playground and therefore their choice to move away from boys to safeguard their interests. In other words, the protection of the prized commodity of food is directly connected to femininities that accommodate boys’ power in the playground. Girls’ realisation of the ways in which gender limits their agency, space and opportunities is not simply a recognition of their muteness but a sophisticated sense of strategically positioning themselves out of violence and in safer zones in the area, where material resources are also better secured. Avoiding boys was less risky than contesting boys, as suggested by the story of the stolen cellphone below:

Contesting the boys’ behaviour has repercussions for Delia, who reported the incident to the teacher. To consolidate masculinity, bigger and older boys were brought together to confront and challenge Delia, producing a fearful femininity and resulting in her absence from school.

A femininity based on avoidance and fear was not the only way in which girls negotiated the school playground. Thorne (1993), in her US primary school study of gender and play, notes that boys and girls separate but they also come together through play. All the girls in this study constructed femininities that were ambiguous. On the one hand, boys were avoided and gentle, softer femininity was produced. On the other hand, girls spoke about the games they played and their active participation in heterosexual cultures that involved chasing and running, hide and seek and a game called ‘spin the bottle’ involving kissing. Heterosexuality is learned and, for girls, this learning is a vital part of the femininity that broke the separation and brought boys and girls into contact as sexual beings. Like Thorne (1993), Renold (2005) and others (Epstein et al., 2001; Paechter, 2007; Bhana, 2016), playground cultures are heterosexualised and girls use play as an important resource to claim heterosexual desirability, making girls less passive and less suppressed in relation to boys, as shown earlier. Breaking from a gentler femininity, girls’ participation in heterosexual play cultures at school produced excitement, but they also contradictorily expressed concern about the normative constructions of gender involving relations of power. The heterosexual games afforded girls an opportunity to demonstrate a desirable femininity, but they could also hide from boys and avoid being ‘caught’ by separating from the boys using the toilet that was demarcated for girls only. As Renold (2005) notes, a real girl involves the projection of desire for the opposite sex and hide and seek functioned to produce this femininity. Girls subject themselves to, and are subjected to, the heterosexual compulsion. Games were key resources through which boyfriend and girlfriend cultures were produced, providing opportunity for exploring and engaging in sexual activities such as kissing.

Playing games like ‘spin the bottle’ is crucial to the production of and investment in heterosexuality as both desirable and dangerous. These ambiguities are captured in the association between ‘spin the bottle’ as a valuable sexualised resource and the construction of boys as problematic. Being a boy involves jockeying for power over girls and other boys, based on heterosexual interests. Being a girl involves projecting, complying with and acting on heterosexual desires (Paechter, 2012; Huuki & Renold, 2015). As Faith suggests, boys and girls ‘get together’ to play ‘spin the bottle’, which involves kissing, the expression of masculinity, femininity, gender inequalities and violence. Jealousy and the fight for girls reveal the underbelly of male power and girls’ subordinate role. Femininities are thus experienced through heterosexual games involving both pleasure and danger, revealing the asymmetrical relations of power and male sexual entitlements and girls’ subordination. The ‘spin the bottle’ experience points to the very tenet of compulsory heterosexuality, with boys depicted as and confirming masculinity as sexually aggressive whilst girls are located outside this configuration as passive observers of boys fighting for girls. The effect of ‘spin the bottle’ and the masculine struggles associated with jealousy and the protection of their sexual turf function to produce girls as sexualised objects (Paechter, 2017). Heterosexuality can privilege femininity but it can be damaging in a gendered way (Renold et al., 2015). Girls learn early about their sexual objectification in masculine struggles and boys learn early that such conduct is both expected and warranted.

Sexual objectification and harassment were also discussed as part of everyday social interactions during the break, where boys were depicted as perpetrators:

The girls spoke about the routinised objectification of girls, through whistling and the sexualised nature of the interactions involving the subordination of girls. Writing about some primary school boys in the UK, Renold (2005) illustrates the ways in which heterosexual masculinity is shored up in the primary school. Here too, masculinity is produced through sexual objectification, harassment and the gaze upon girls’ bodies. The girls define their experience of sexual harassment, through which gender and body were connected and differentially valued. An idealised version of heterosexual femininity was produced through boys as not ‘skinny’ and ‘pretty with big bums’. Touching and grabbing were also described as commonplace experiences in informal school settings, and served to maintain gender hierarchies.

Earlier in this section, the toilet was considered to be a ‘safe’ zone where girls could hide from boys during hide and seek, but there were several transgressions as reported above, with boys feeling entitled to enter the toilet and violate girls’ bodies. Given this environment, femininity was produced with great ambivalence—coming together in heterosexual games, contesting passivity but separating because of the expectations and experiences with masculinity. While some girls ignored these acts of violence, there were examples of active resistance against sexual coercion and harassing behaviour, when concerns were raised about inappropriate touching:

Compulsory heterosexuality invokes male domination, male sexual entitlement and girls’ subordination. Girls like Zora described these sexually coercive behaviours as routinely experienced but not all reported it. Gender relations of power and inequalities enable a context in which girls’ bodies and body parts are sexualised and violated. It is key to the making of heterosexual masculinity. In this context, girls remain vulnerable to being devalued through sexual shaming, coercion and inappropriate touching. Zora responded to the sexual violence by mediating confidentiality with the teacher, Mr Zuma. She resisted threats from the perpetrator and refused to acquiesce to male power. Resistance against boys as described above was a means to safeguard and protect girls from the violence sanctioned by hegemonic heterosexualised masculinity.

Dress‐up Friday: Cool girls, heterosexuality and the fight for boys

Heterosexuality is central to how primary school girls (and boys) construct relationships and, despite the relative silence around primary schooling sexual cultures, femininities are produced in culturally variant ways that defy simple passive girl and violent boy logic. In this section, I show how idealised ‘respectable’ femininity is transgressed by ‘cool girls’ who wear short school dresses, ‘show their bums’, swear and engage in fights with other girls and boys in the heterosexual competition as they defy gender norms. On Fridays, the school practices no‐uniform day and children are charged R2 or 14 US cents for the privilege of not wearing school uniform. When the girls discussed Fridays, they referred to a hypersexualised version of femininity that was expressed through glamorous hairdos, make‐up and dressing up:

The regulation of femininities occurs through the good girl/cool girl binary, both operating within a compulsory heterosexual matrix. As other research indicates, good‐ girl femininities are upheld through heteronormative constructions of sexual docility, respectability and appropriate feminine conduct (Kehily, 2002; Renold & Ringrose, 2013). The assumption of an appropriate femininity rests on good conduct, appropriate dress and stylisation of the self in a way that is not overtly sexualised. It depends on how one looks and appears, valorising appropriate conduct around sex and sexuality. Separating from ‘cool girls’, Hanna dissociates from a femininity that is sexually promiscuous and sexually explicit in dress code. A sexual double‐bind operates, whereby girls who expose their bodies are shamed whilst simultaneously blamed for male sexual attention and male aggression that create risk for women and girls. ‘We are not like that’ is suggestive of the multiplicity of femininities but also the hierarchies through which normative feminine positions are reproduced. ‘Showing oneself off’ on dress‐up Fridays was not simply a heterosexual marker of desirability, but also one that trumpeted class. It must be noted here that the girls emerge from low‐economic settings and social marginalisation. Dressing up is an important resource to mediate against economic misery. In mediating against poverty, dressing up suggests girls’ active agency in resisting the poverty that marks their everyday lives and struggles. As Mary says, ‘When you wear something that isn't nice, everyone will start laughing at you’. Cool girls’ heterosexual desirability thus interlocks with class and gender. Dressing up on Fridays thus has considerable value for claiming identity, dignity and expressing sexuality. Cool girls gain power through dress amidst economic distress but, contradictorily, they also stand to lose ‘reputational’ value in doing so, as they transgress the normative constructions of femininity.

Dating, kissing, sexual rumours, boyfriend–girlfriend cultures and love letters strongly feature in the primary school sexual economy (Thorne, 1993; Bhana, 2016). Girls are heavily invested in boyfriend–girlfriend relationships, and the fight for boys is an embodiment of heterosexual femininity:

Cool girl femininity takes on violent aberrations to reconstruct heterosexual desirability in the fight for boys. Jealousy, rumours, questions about sexual desirability and verbal abuse comprise the complex cocktail through which the heterosexual competition with other girls manifests. Whilst good/nice girl femininity supports and accommodates heterosexual masculine power through presentations of respectability and niceness, cool girls are also complicit in and support the reproduction of heterosexuality through non‐normative conduct. Both forms of femininity serve the interests of compulsory heterosexuality (Butler, 1990). Looking pretty, having ‘big bums’, verbally harassing and swearing at other girls suggests the potency of the male gaze as girls fight for and over boys through a sexualised hierarchy of power (Renold & Ringrose, 2013). There were strong investments in relationships, with some of the girls reporting that having sex amongst grade 7s was not uncommon, as Nellie says:

… behind the grade 2 blocks and some of them wait until it's home time and they go into the bushes and they do stuff. I have seen that once. I was in grade 5 that time. I didn't know if I had to report it or just walk away. Yea, many girls have sex …

Girls’ strong investment in heterosexuality and relationships, even in grade 7, meant that competition and cheating often led to violence. Defying gender norms outside the victim/agent binary, Nellie describes a non‐normative femininity based on aggression involving girl‐on‐girl violence set amidst cheating boyfriends:

Femininity and heterosexuality is produced, not through passive acceptance of male power, but through active participation in violent gendered cultures. With all its complexity, Nikita and Nellie interpret the effects of non‐normative femininity and the use of violence against cheating boyfriends. Non‐normative femininity may be produced outside the passive girl and active male binary. However, defiance of gender norms for boys shores up masculinity in ways that serve to reinforce the binary. The reports of violence against girls who hit cheating boyfriends serve to preserve male privilege but also the need to be seen by others to be correcting the violation of gender norms. It is boys who are expected to use violence. Whilst girls use violence as resistance, it is also violence that is the dominant resource through which boys and girls make sense of their experiences. When boys correct the violence meted out to them, they re‐establish gender norms that were potentially challenged by a non‐normative femininity. Boys thus reclaim power within a social landscape of gender power and sexuality, where violence and rape are used as threats against non‐conforming girls.

Conclusion

In studies that examine gender, sexuality and violence in sub‐Saharan Africa, young girls in primary school remain largely outside the scope of the research. As noted above, there are a few exceptions. Exploring how girls construct femininity underlined by compulsory heterosexuality suggests the relational dynamics at play producing acquiescence, resistance and complicity in this process. This study adds to the significant body of work in the West that suggests that girls’ experience of primary schooling is the experience of heterosexuality and the inequalities it sustains (Renold, 2005; Paechter, 2007, 2017). The playground and ‘dress‐up Friday’ reveal patterned gendered relations through which sexuality is experienced. Girls’ precarious relationships with boys and with each other concern heteronormativity, their sexual objection within gender relations of power. When resistance against dominant masculinity was articulated, it was strategically mediated, for example through the teacher Mr Zuma or by consolidating peer group support away from boys in the field. In an environment dominated by male power, fear of repercussions and rape, girls’ agency is often quelled through boys’ attempts to re‐establish boundaries through violence. Girls are not passive in this process, actively engaging with boys through heterosexual play whilst dressing up and accruing heterosexual power and privilege on ‘dress‐up Fridays’. Fighting with and for boys is an instantiation of non‐normative femininity, but heavily governed by heterosexual desire and the heterosexual competition with other girls. The paper offered insight into how femininities were produced by navigating the informal primary school world ordered by heterosexuality (Butler, 1990) and ‘mostly by boys’.

Importantly, the ways in which femininities are produced here are situated experiences in which race, class and gender inequalities form an important backdrop to understanding the marginalisation of girls within this low‐economic school setting. Femininity is thus produced within this system in which fear of boys is linked to material impoverishment, dominant gender and cultural norms and male power. As the findings illustrate, girls are sophisticated in understanding their place in gender relations and mediate rather than passively accept their situation. Their mediation is thus carefully positioned in relation to this male‐dominated environment in the playground and outside school, where older boys and boys from the school can punish girls who do not acquiesce. The construction of femininity on ‘dress‐up Friday’ is both privileging and damaging, with sexual objectification and slut‐shaming prevalent.

As Mirembe and Davies (2001: 413) note in their study of schooling in Uganda, ‘if heterosexuality is inherently a form of power play, then schooling in this case only enhanced the power imbalance instead of providing a supporting environment for a challenge to wider social and sexual practices’.

Like Porter (2015), the findings in this paper suggest that girls’ agency is paradoxical, as they ‘scripted’ into relations of domination and subordination within a heteronormative framework where violence remains pervasive. Girls’ resistance shows potential, but such resistance is embedded in and constrained by the school and the broader context in which girls continue to face vulnerability to male violence. The question is not, however, about girls’ lack of power, but how to enable the exercise of agency that mediates both institutional and structural inequalities (Bajaj & Pathmarajah, 2011). Whilst I have elaborated upon girls’ agency, there is a need to understand that agency operates within the parameters of structural inequalities and male entitlements (Jewkes & Morrell, 2012). Girls continue to bear the burden of sexual harassment and violence at school. Space at school is a male domain, and girls have to negotiate what to do and where to go, as they face up to their vulnerability. Their experience is complexly intertwined with material struggles, and fighting for lunch and for boys is a significant part of the problem. The point here is that girls exercise agency, but this form of agency is not unrestricted, being deeply entwined with heteronormativity and its associated inequalities, situated in a broader climate of male privilege and violence and underlying structural inequalities. It would be incorrect to celebrate the small ways in which they experience the volatility and turbulence of everyday life in the primary school. Indeed, it is not helpful to argue that South African girls are agents without addressing the complex interaction with inequalities, poverty and hegemonic forms of masculinity that continue to circumscribe their lives. In this way, the study also contributes to the scholarship about femininity, agency and sexuality (Mirembe & Davies, 2001; Jewkes & Morrell, 2012; Porter, 2015), as it argues for a stronger focus on younger girls in primary school, one that is long overdue.

Addressing gender and sexuality in the primary school and the nuanced formations of femininities is vital. These nuanced everyday experiences in this paper are often unnoticed, because the primary school is not expected to be a place where children invest in sexuality (Renold, 2005). Increasing the research into what primary schools can reveal about the different manifestations of gender and sexuality and the deployment of power is critical in much of sub‐Saharan Africa. We know so little about the everyday lives of South African children. Moreover, teachers need to be trained to understand that gender and sexuality are key to primary school identities. Children are agents with investment in gender and sexuality. Such sensitisation could perhaps help to alleviate the current context in which girls continue to suffer. Institutional support for developing girls’ agency is critical, and teachers trained in understanding children's investment in sexuality and the associated inequalities are required, as their lack of understanding allows for and permits violent‐gendered cultures. Girls also need supportive environments to understand the paradox through which heterosexuality is framed, in order to hold on to what is pleasurable whilst letting go of damaging investments in sexuality. To address girls’ agency is not simply about reporting violence, but addressing the larger discursive environment through which male power is upheld. Considering the relational dynamic of gender requires attention to primary school boys to address and develop alternative forms of masculinity that are both invested in gender equality and better outcomes for boys. By conceptualising both boys and girls as actively invested in sexuality, new possibilities can be created in the primary school to address inequalities, sex, sexuality, power and violence. Finally, as South Africa grapples with the problem of gender and sexual violence, it would seem important to direct more attention to younger children than is currently the case—before it is too late.