Slaying, twerking and bounded becomings

Teenage girls’ digital sexual assemblages in South Africa

Bibliographic Data

ID19224366
AuthorsD Bhana (0000-0002-8504-041X, University of KwaZulu-Natal, corresponding author), Omeshree Lakhan (0000-0003-3528-8713, University of KwaZulu-Natal)
Year2026
Publication date2026-05-19
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew Media & Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1461-4448 • E-ISSN: 1461-7315
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/14614448261447405
OpenAlexW7161641219
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited52

In South Africa, sexual danger dominates research with teenage girls. This article shifts this focus by examining how teenage girls actively shape their sexual cultures through social media within digital sexual assemblages. Drawing on arts-based collage-making and focus group discussions with 15- to 18-year-old black South African girls, the article analyses how practices of slaying, selfie production, twerking and engagement with celebrity cultures produce heterosexual desirability. These practices open possibilities for reconfiguring normative femininities. However, girls’ becomings are constrained through racialised beauty ideals, body-shaming, sexual double standards and heteropatriarchal norms that intensify self-surveillance and embodied vulnerability. The article shows how girls’ digital sexual cultures are embroiled within ongoing tensions between capacity and constraint, where expressions of sexuality are both enabled and foreclosed. It argues for the importance of creative, arts-based engagements that move beyond risk-based frameworks to address the material, affective and structural conditions shaping girls’ gendered and sexual lives

Beauty · Embodied cognition · Focus (optics) · Focus group · Human sexuality · Normative · Selfie · Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology

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Open DOIOpen Access