Young Families

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Gender, sexuality and care Young Families: Gender, Sexuality and Care draws together unique and compelling essays about the contexts of early childbearing, a topic that is now taken for granted. It draws on empirical data, multi-level approaches and inter-disciplinary perspectives on the dynamics that underpin young people’s experiences of being pregnant, having a child and caring for the child. The book explores the contexts in which young families are constituted and shaped along with the kinds of social relationships and communities of care that early childbearing creates (or in some instances destroys). It shows the entanglement of gender, sexuality, race, age and class in the formation of young families and its effects on caring practices. This book draws together unique and compelling accounts that address a gap in the existing literature on families in South Africa while also providing an understanding of the diversity of young South African families. Young Families will be of interest and of benefit to those in the fields of Women and Gender studies, Anthropology, Education, Sociology, History and Demography.

List of Tables and Figures

OPENING LINES

Chapter 1: Understanding Young Families in South Africa
Nolwazi Mkhwanazi and Deevia Bhana

Chapter 2: Popular Perspectives on Teenage Pregnancy in South Africa
Rebecca Hodes

Chapter 3: Teenage Mothers and Fathers: A Demographic Perspective
Sibusiso Mkwananzi

YOUNG MOTHERS

Chapter 4: Anisa’s Story: Becoming A Teenage Mother In An Indian Community
Deevia Bhana

Chapter 5: Mina’s Story: ‘Sick’ with Child in an Afrikaans Speaking Community
Nina Botha

Chapter 6: Aliyah’s story: Generational Change in Manenberg
Anna Versfeld

Chapter 7: Rethabile’s Story: To Be Young, Pregnant and Black
Nolwazi Mkhwanazi

YOUNG FATHERS

Chapter 8: Regulating and Mediating Fathers’ Involvement in Families: The Negotiation of Inhlawulo
Nolmvuyo Nkani

Chapter 9: “I was not planning to have a child at such a young age”. Experiences of young fathers in Durban, South Africa
Siphamandla Chili and Pranitha Maharaj

Chapter 10: Ubaba ukhona kodwa angikabi namandla: Navigating Teenage Fatherhood in Rural Kwazulu-Natal
Nozipho Mvune

INTERGENERATIONAL CARE

Chapter 11: Young Mothers Parenting at School: Gendered Narratives on Family and Care Practices
Sisa Ngabaza and Tamara Shefer

Chapter 12: Control as Support: Improving the Outcomes for Teenage Mothers
Shakila Singh and Preenisha Naicker

Chapter 13: Negotiating Motherhood at the Intersection of Intergenerational Fertility, HIV and Care
Alison Swartz

Chapter 14: Moral Mothers and Disobedient Daughters: A Politics of Care and Moral Personhood Across the Generations
Rosemary Blake

DISRUPTIONS

Chapter 15: Disrupted Families: The Social Production of Child Abandonment in Urban Johannesburg
Deirdre Blackie

Nolwazi Mkhwanazi is an anthropologist and a senior researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) at the University of the Witwatersrand. She obtained her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge (2005). Her research is on teenage pregnancy, kinship and care in the townships of the Western Cape. The research findings have been published in local and international peer-reviewed journals, such as Culture, Health & Sexuality; African Identities and Medical Anthropology.

DeeviaBhana is the DST/NRF South African research chair (SARChI) in Gender and Childhood
Sexuality and a professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She is the author of Under Pressure:
The regulation of sexualities in South African secondary schools (MaThoko/Modjaji Books,
2014); Childhood sexuality and AIDS education: The price of innocence (Routledge, 2016) Gender and Childhood Sexuality in the Primary School (Springer, 2016). Her latest book is Love, Sex and Teenage Sexual Cultures in South Africa: 16 turning 17 (Routledge, 2018).