‘Girls hit!’ Constructing and negotiating violent African femininities in a working-class primary school

Whenever gender violence and schooling have been the topic of South African research, the investigations focus on African boys in secondary schools. In contrast, this paper focuses on the ways in which violence is mobilized by African schoolgirls in a working-class primary school context. By drawing on selected elements of an ethnographic study of gender in the junior years of primary schooling, the paper examines young seven- and eight-year-old girls’ use of violence as a significant resource in a context of massive social deprivation and economic instability. In such contexts, violence is an important means through which some girls define, create and consolidate their femininities. In the absence of research which focuses on the violent expressions of femininity, this paper argues that within the context of persistent social and economic inequalities which mark South African society, girl-on-girl violence is an important means to secure resources and claims to power.