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This article builds on recent anthropologies of youth and childhood in contemporary Africa to incorporate perspectives on gender, age, maturation, and life course, particularly as these engage a politics of place and historically specific experiences of emplacement. The ethnography focuses on events surrounding teenage girls' involvement in city work and travel in the peri‐urban areas of Harare, Zimbabwe, at a time when women's bodies and behaviours were the focus of renewed attempts to reform urban domesticities and when young women's urban activities were becoming crucial to peri‐urban household survival. In this context the risks and upheavals of youthfulness become a shared, intergenerational concern with social continuity: young women came to be seen as compliant rebels, involved in marginal, 'playful', and vital work that might secure threatened futures. The ethnography thus questions the often assumed equation of youthfulness or youth projects with socio‐cultural transformation.Le présent article s'appuie sur les travaux anthropologiques récents consacrés à la jeunesse et à l'enfance dans l'Afrique contemporaine pour y intégrer un point de vue sur le sexe, l'âge, la maturation et la destinée, en particulier lorsque ceux‐ci sont liés à une politique des lieux et à des expériences historiquement spécifiques de l'emplacement. L'ethnographie est consacrée à des événements entourant l'engagement d'adolescentes zimbabwéennes dans le travail et les déplacements en ville, dans les quartiers périurbains d'Harare, à une époque où le corps et le comportement des femmes faisaient l'objet de nouvelle tentatives de réformer la sphère domestique et où les activités urbaines des jeunes femmes devenaient indispensables à la survie des ménages périurbains. Dans ce contexte, les risques et les bouleversements de la jeunesse deviennent une préoccupation partagée entre les générations, avec une constante sociale : les jeunes femmes sont finalement considérées comme des rebelles dociles, engagées dans un travail marginal, « ludique » et vital, susceptible de sécuriser des avenirs menacés. L'ethnographie remet donc en question la corrélation souvent implicite de la juvénilité ou des projets des jeunes avec les transformations socioculturelles.

Cover; Book title; Copyright; Contents; Acknowledgements; Introduction; How to use this book; R021: Essential values of care for use with individuals in care settings; R022: Communicating and working with individuals in health, social care and early years settings; R023: Understanding body systems and disorders; R024: Pathways for providing care in health, social care and early years settings; R025: Understanding life stages; R026: Planning for employment in health, social care and the children and young people's workforce

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Sexuality and the Postwar Domestic 'Revival' -- 3. Hope for the Future or Repercussions of the Past: Discursive Constructions of Youth -- 4. Youth Gone Bad: The Sexual Meaning of Delinquency -- 5. 'Why Can't I Be Normal?': Sex Advice for Teen -- 6. Sex Goes to School: Debates over Sex Education in Toronto Schools -- 7. Manipulating Innocence: Corruptibility, Youth, and the Case against Obscenity -- 8. Conclusion -- Notes -- Sources -- Illustration Credits -- Index

In popular and professional discourses about effeminacy or sissyness, boys' feelings about sport and their actual athletic abilities have been represented both as symptoms of gender deviance and as targets for clinical intervention. The assumption has been that knowing something about a boy's feelings for sport tells us considerably more than that about him. This article looks at the special role played by sport in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once called "the war on effeminate boys" (1991). Following Sedgwick, the article considers how gendered ideas about sport and athleticism came to influence the diagnostic criteria that made up the highly contested diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder in Childhood (GIDC) that appeared in the third (1980) and fourth (1994) editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. The article analyzes the specific behavioral criteria that came to ground the diagnosis of GIDC, showing the effects of sport discourses well beyond the playing field or the gym. Sources are drawn from two overlapping literatures: early and mid-twentieth-century psychological studies that focused on sex differences in children's play; and a small specialist literature, written by psychologists and psychiatrists, beginning in the early 1960s, on the "problem" of effeminate boys. My reading of these texts considers how they were informed by gendered discourses around sport and play behaviors; I pay particular attention to scales and other instruments developed by researchers and clinicians to measure "gender abnormality" in boys' play. I argue that effeminate boys — and other queer people — need a physical culture that helps shift, rather than reinforce, understandings of the body and gender; that challenges the links between bodies, genders, and sexualities; and that traffics in uncertainties about who can and should do what with their bodies. Mainstream sport is not yet that thing.

For much of the 20th century, dance writers and critics regularly bemoaned a shortage of male dancers. As one writer put it, the average American father would rather see his son dead than performing on stage in tights. This article looks at commentary about male dancing as a means of understanding popular conceptions of effeminacy. It addresses the way discourses about sport, physical prowess and hard bodies have been appropriated in attempts to validate the manliness of male dancers. Drawing on works by dance educators, critics and dancers, such as Gene Kelly and American modern dancer Ted Shawn, the article looks at gendered notions of the body and movement and the way these have been shaped by the late 19th-century conflation of effeminacy and homosexuality. The athleticism and muscularity of male dancers were to have brought them mainstream respect; that they have yet to do so at all but elite levels reminds us that even the hardest bodies must be read through the limitations of the discursive contexts in which they move.