‘ We girls like pleasing boys’ : love, risk and gender power in rural girls’ (hetero)sexual relationships

This article examines how teenage girls in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, navigate heterosexual relationships shaped by emotional dependency, patriarchal moralities, and intersecting structural inequalities. Drawing on focus groups and interviews with 48 school-going girls, and framed through intersectional Afro-feminist perspectives, the article shows that sexual risk-taking among rural teenage girls is rooted not in ignorance but in affective economies that equate love with sacrifice, trust with compliance, and loyalty with endurance. The findings reveal how girls’ emotional labour, such as sustaining relationships, tolerating infidelity, and avoiding conflict, becomes a key mechanism through which heteropatriarchal power is reproduced in intimate life. By foregrounding emotion as a site of political regulation and negotiation, the paper advances a relational understanding of teenage sexuality and calls for interventions that centre emotional justice, feminist relational ethics, and structural transformation. The study contributes to gender studies and, in particular, African feminist scholarship by illuminating how Black rural girls’ affective worlds expose both the vulnerabilities and the subtle resistances embedded in the everyday politics of love and survival.