‘From Young Adults to Teenagers: Sex Education Manuals and the Making of Modern Youth in Apartheid South Africa’

In ‘From Young Adults to Teenagers: Sex Education Manuals and the Making of Modern Youth in Apartheid South Africa’ I consider the ways in which two sex education manuals published in multiple editions from the early 1950s to the early 2000s, and written by white, male members of the apartheid medical establishment, approached the categories of ‘adolescent’ and, later, ‘teenager.’ Addressing themselves exclusively to a white, Afrikaans, and increasingly middle-class audience, these manuals demonstrate how anxiety about white sexuality under apartheid translated into growing efforts to contain and control the ways in which young white men and women negotiated and understood sex and sexuality.