Childhood Sexualities: On Pleasure and Meaning from the Margins

Sexualities scholarship marginalizes childhood sexual pleasure, positioning children as vulnerable subjects. This article repositions childhood sexualities within a pleasure-centered, globally oriented, and power-aware frame informed by feminist, queer, and decolonial perspectives. Drawing on Southern research from South Africa and other contexts, we interrogate dominant narratives of sexual innocence that suppress young people’s desires and show how children negotiate pleasure and meaning amid intersecting hierarchies of age, race, gender, and class. By centering margins, we reveal pleasure as both contested and generative, exposing the workings of domination while opening pathways toward gender and sexual justice. We argue that rejecting adult-centric/adultist approaches to sexualities and attending to childhood pleasure is indispensable for an inclusive sociology and just sexual futures.