The Cape Town boyfriend and the Joburg boyfriend: women's sexual partnerships and social networks in Khayelitsha, Cape Town

Abstract

In South Africa, young people's "multiple" or "concurrent" partnerships have been increasingly prominent in public health discourses - as drivers of HIV transmission. Multiple partnerships are typically framed in moralising, negative terms and depicted primarily as male-driven, within a broader framework of women's vulnerability and use of sex for survival and material gain. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with adolescents and young adults in Khayelitsha township near Cape Town, this article investigates young women's partnerships by exploring their complex interpersonal and social dynamics. We unpack women's multiple motivations for, and careful management strategies of, both sexual and social relationships in a broader context of socio-economic exclusion, threats to health and well-being, social obligations and relationships of care. The meanings and practices associated with young people's relationships are more than the sum of individual sexual behaviours, rigid cultural...