Relationality, religion and resistance: teenage girlhood and sexual agency in Tanzania

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Tanzania, this paper shows that teenage girls’ opportunities for sexual agency are shaped through assemblages of normative girlhood and appropriate sexuality. Whilst girls themselves negotiate and resist the disempowering affects of such assemblages, as shown through vignettes which illustrate the experiences of three girls who were involved in the education project where fieldwork took place, their capacity to do so is linked to the broader networks of relationships within which girls were situated. Taking friendships and religious affiliation as examples, I show how relationships can generate the conditions for girls to resist assemblages of norms and expectations that structure sexuality and girlhood - but may also reinforce them. This paper counters prevailing narratives on teenage girls’ sexual agency in developing countries as inherently lacking, requiring external recuperation in the form of education and ‘empowerment’, and explores the implications of a relational framing for interventions which seek to genuinely expand girls’ sexual agency.