Chapter 4: Gender and Sexuality in Early Childhood: Lessons for African Feminists

This chapter is concerned with addressing the missing focus of gender and sexuality in early childhood. In the Global South, relatively little research has sought to examine how ^‘little^’ boys and girls give meaning to sexualities in ways that are both pleasurable and harmful. Instead, childhood sexualities and gender remain stubbornly aligned to conservative agendas that support sexual innocence and are in conflict with feminist goals. Underlying this scholarship is the paradox of adult anxieties around childhood sexualities and boys’ and girls’ own conceptualisations that speak back to and challenge sexual innocence. Reckoning with the reality that today the global educational response to issues around gender, sexualities and inequalities has failed to provide a space for the voices of younger children especially in Global South contexts, the chapter turns attention to the African context and the entanglement of children and childhood with calamity and crisis which the author argues has prevented a more adequate understanding of gender and childhood sexuality.