Although young people in Zimbabwe are becoming sexually active at a very early age, there is no unified body of knowledge on how they regard sex and construct sexuality and relationships. In many circumstances adolescence sexual agency is denied and silenced. This study explored adolescents’ discourses on sexuality, factors affecting adolescent sexuality, and sexual health. Fusing a social constructionist standpoint and an active view of agency, we argue that the way male adolescents perceive and experience sexuality and construct sexual identities is mediated by the sociocultural context in which they live in and their own agency. Although adolescents are mistakenly regarded as sexual innocents by society, we argue that male adolescents are active social agents in constructing their own sexual realities and identities. At the same time, dominant structural and interactional factors have a bearing on how male adolescents experience and generate sexuality. 1. Introduction This study explores empirically adolescents’ construction of sexuality. According to Nyanzi [1] sexuality is constructed as the domain exclusive to adults with preconditions of physical and social maturity. Thus, notions of child sexuality are often viewed as taboo, antithetical, nonissues, or even dangerous and cause for moral panic. Such perceptions of “unknowledgeable or ill-informed adolescents” and “high-risk adolescents” are rife in the literature on youth and HIV/AIDS [2]. Adult sexual cultures and religious and moral discourses are deployed or implicated in positioning adolescent sexuality as taboo. Putting sexuality and children together remains problematic and morally troubling regardless of policy efforts to change this [3]. As noted by Renold [4], underlying this trouble are familiar ideologies that associate school-going learners with sexual innocence which creates the myth of an asexual child who must be protected from corrupting sexual information, producing a regulatory mechanism through which morality, sexuality, and young people at school are framed. Longstanding tropes of sexual innocence position the child as an object of concern, thwarting sexual curiosity [5]. In spite of such narrow conceptualizations of children, a number of studies demonstrate that adolescents are active sexual beings. Against representations that associate children with sexual innocence, this study examined adolescents’ discourses on notions of sexuality as well as their sexual health as it has been demonstrated that their needs are different from those of adults. The focus of the study is
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