The desiring girl in South African young adult fiction

Abstract

Girls in South African young adult (YA) fiction typically represent a heteropatriarchal, sexually passive model of femininity that allows for neither sexual autonomy nor sexual desire. This article examines six prominent South African YA novels that are unusual in that the sexual desires of their teenage heroines play an important role in shaping plot or character: S. A. Partridge’s Dark Poppy’s Demise (2011); Adeline Radloff’s Sidekick (2010); Sonwabiso Ngcowa’s In Search of Happiness (2014); and Lily Herne’s Mall Rats series of three books. The study finds that even in these rare examples of South African texts that treat girls’ desires as significant, desire mostly remains ambivalent or is treated evasively, while violence, by contrast, is embedded in each novel’s social context and routinely described at length, in explicit detail. South African girls live in a violent world, but the article argues that reducing their lives to a single violent dimension only perpetuates that violence. And in correlating girls’ desire indissociably with violence, these texts normalize the violent punishment of girls whose femininity is not sexually passive.