An interview with Deevia Bhana about her edited collection, Gender and Young People's Digital Sexual Cultures
Our member, Prof. Deevia Bhana (University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa), talks about her edited collection, Gender and Young People's Digital Sexual Cultures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025).
Q: What is this edited collection about?
This book is based on a project focusing on young people’s digital sexual cultures. The authors in this book are part of the project and a number of chapters that comprise this book constitute early career scholars. I am especially proud of this work as it advances the next generation of scholars in the field. The book is especially relevant, not only because of the scarcity of work in the Global South but in light of global pressure and legal attempts to censure, ban and limit young people’s access to social media.
The book shows how young people’s experiences of digital technologies involves both pleasure and danger. On the one hand, technologies enable romantic pursuits, access to pornography, and sites that enable the exhibition of sexiness. On the other hand, the ‘firewall of patriarch’ remains ever present in limiting girls’ capacities in particular.
Each chapter focuses on a different site of digital sexual culture including emojis and stickers; sexy selfies; technology-facilitated gender-based violence; porn and masturbation; and boys’ gaming rituals. Several chapters draw attention to local customary practices, the context of class inequalities and gender norms to provide rich contextual specificity to young people’s experience of digital technologies. The book argues for a post-digital sexual citizenship that recognises both the potential and the constraints of online spaces for gender and sexual justice.
Q: What made you initiate this volume?
The impetus for this book arose from a glaring gap in how scholars and policymakers address young people’s digital sexual cultures in the Global South. It is important to understand what young South Africans are doing online in order to mediate discussions about their assumed vulnerability and passivity. We initiated this collection to move beyond reductive binaries and foreground young people’s own experiences of pleasure, exploration and constraint. By centring empirical research, we offer contextually grounded insights into how gendered power relations are reproduced, and sometimes contested through digital platforms.
The book has drawn from new feminist materialism and assemblage theory, to show how technologies, images, norms and bodies as co-constitutive actors in young people’s sexual becoming. This theoretical approach emerged from our need to capture the dynamic entanglements of human and more-than-human elements shaping youth practices. Finally, we sought to inform policy, education and activism by demonstrating that effective responses must acknowledge both the liberatory potentials of digital media and the persistent firewall of patriarchy. In doing so, the book advocates for nuanced strategies that support sexual justice while mitigating online harms.
An excerpt from the introductory chapter:
In 2024, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Instagram, along with four other prominent digital technology (tech) executives, faced the blunt accusation of ‘blood on your hands’ in the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on ‘Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis’. The crime? It was claimed that their social media platforms, sites for the distribution of sexual images and grooming, served as breeding grounds for sexual predators who target young people (minors, under 18 years old) for human trafficking. At the Senate Judiciary Committee, the tech executives were berated for failing to protect young people, and were accused of doing little to safeguard them from online sexual dangers. The image of grieving families holding pictures of their children, whose lives had been tragically affected by online harms, pointed to the urgent need for better protection measures from sexual exploitation and harassment. Zuckerberg apologised for harmful online sexual abuse. However, he added, ‘Every day teens and young people do amazing things on our services. They use our apps to create new things, express themselves, explore the world around them, and feel more connected to the people they care about’…All around the world, young people's interactions with digital technologies and social media through mobile phones, computers and other digital devices have become a ‘rallying point’ over childhood sexuality and, subsequently, a subject of intense concern…These anxieties are hardly surprising given that the relationship between minors (young people) and sexuality remains controversial.
This book is situated in South Africa. It addresses transversal and cross-cutting issues that affect young people in all parts of the world where risk-based assessments of young people’s digital sexual cultures are prominent… Social media platforms offer young people—across transnational and global contexts—unprecedented opportunities to publicise, explore, and express their sexuality. Courting, dating, flirting, and learning about sexuality are now supported by social media platforms such as TikTok, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Snapchat. These platforms enable young people to post selfies, and interact via suggestive digital stickers, emojis, nude pictures (henceforth nudes), videos and other image-based sexual practices, including pornography…and sexting. The ubiquity of digital technologies and the decreasing costs of cellphones/smartphones means that young people—even those from disadvantaged backgrounds or living in poverty—now have unprecedented opportunities to explore and express their sexuality… Yet, how young people make sense of their entanglement with digital technologies and social media is downplayed in favour of sensationalised reporting in which young people’s sexual risk is overstated and misunderstood…
To date, very little consideration has been given to young people’s sexual wishes, or to the need for young people to develop online-offline skills. Young people’s digital experiences are often overshadowed and reduced to opposing schools of thought: as a canvas of sexual peril/risk or a haven for expression. These polarities between risk and creation reduce young people’s engagement with social media to a reductive, binary discourse…The dichotomy obscures what young people are actually doing online, either by idealising their digital practices or, more frequently, by viewing such practices as risky. Overlooking how young people use digital affordances for sexual purposes allows the binary between risk and resource to proliferate while making invisible the nuances of, for example, gender and sexuality in digital connections. Risk and resource approaches both overlook the situated and creative ways in which gender and sexual connections are significant to young people’s digital lives. This is a key focus of this book.
Moving beyond causality, binaries, and side-taking, Gender and Young People’s Digital Sexual Cultures focuses on the different significances that both young men and women attach to gender and sexuality as they engage with digital technologies such as social media, internet-enabled smart devices, text messaging, and gaming platforms. The book seeks to answer two questions: In what ways do young people express their sexuality through digital technologies? And, what are the gendered implications of their digital sexual engagements? While research has tended to focus narrowly on risk and harm, often overlooking digital sexual pleasures, gendered practices and the intimate connections between young bodies, this book widens our understanding to bolster support for young people as they navigate the gendered social materialities and complexities of the digital sexual landscape.