Sounding girlhood at the margins: community radio, black rural young women and everyday identity work in Limpopo, South Africa

This article examines how Black rural young women in Limpopo, South Africa, use community radio to perform and negotiate girlhood at the margins of media and national visibility. It addresses a persistent problem in African media and identity scholarship, namely the tendency to foreground urban, digital, or male-centred spaces when theorising African youth and Africanness. The study asks how young women sound themselves on and around the radio, what forms of everyday identity work this entails, and how gender, class, rurality, and religion intersect in these practices. Theoretically, it develops an integrated framework that brings African feminist work on Black girlhood into conversation with concepts of sonic counterpublics and everyday identity work. Methodologically, the article draws on a qualitative case study of a community radio station in rural Limpopo, combining close analysis of youth-oriented talk and music shows with focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and field notes. The analysis shows that community radio provides a modest but significant space in which young women negotiate competing scripts of ‘good girl’, ‘modern girl’ and ‘rural girl’, using humour, code-switching, music requests and silences to both reproduce and trouble dominant norms of respectability, sexuality and aspiration.