The book investigates how teenage girls in South Africa encounter and consume pornography, situating their experiences within wider sociocultural and affective relations of power. It focuses on girls’ online playful and pleasurable pursuits as they explore and expand upon their sexual curiosities.

In this digital moment, the book directs us to the multi-layered meanings around porn, as an everyday normative experience. The book takes on an interdisciplinary approach drawing from and inspired by new feminist materialism and assemblage theorizing. For teenage girls porn is freely available to see in billboards, magazines, books, on television, music videos, games, online streaming and social media sites. Girls do not have to view hardcore porn to see porn: it is everywhere. It argues that girls’ online playful adventures are a critical site for learning, developing, and negotiating gender and sexuality. These meanings are constitutive of pleasure and the pursuit of learning sexually, but they also provide a launch pad for girls to contest race, gender, and heterosexual domination while opening up online porn to broader interrogation and critique.

The book will be of interest to researchers across African studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, youth, gender and sexuality studies, porn studies, and childhood studies.

Key Themes:

• Porn as a Norm: Pornography is embedded in everyday media (billboards, magazines, TV, music videos, social media) — girls don’t need to watch hardcore porn to be exposed.
• Playful Exploration: Girls’ online playful pursuits are crucial for learning about sexuality and gender, offering both pleasure and educational value.
• Negotiating Identity: Girls use porn to contest race, gender, and heterosexual domination, making it a space for resistance and critique.
• Power Relations: Explores how pornography functions within structures of power and inequality, acting as both a tool for oppression and a site for empowerment.