This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing academic endeavours of youth scholars to problematize discourses and policies, which homogenize young people. Highlighting the effects of gender, class, race, sexuality and ability, intersectionality is a useful concept for analysing the unique experiences of young women and men. However, it will be argued that analysing people’s experiences and perceptions through the sole deployment of the aforementioned categories, even if taken in their intersection, may not sufficiently capture the complexities of lived realities. A rigid commitment to predominant categories can reduce analysis to the mere inclusion of the excluded and thus to finding the expected manifestations of power and inequality (Chadwick, 2017; McCall 2005). Instead, intersectional approaches should articulate new analytical frames (Winker and Degele, 2011), which are spatially and timely specific (Anthias, 2012), and which grasp the salient systems of power as they are experienced by the people. This is especially pertinent with regards to the youth, in order to recognize the value and importance of their own agency, language and positionalities and to minimize inter-generational impositions.
The reliance on pre-existing analytical frames is prevalent in South Africa, where race, class, gender and sexuality are omnipresent discursive tools of political populism and essentialized markers of difference. The South African youth, and university students in particular, have been assessed through these categorical lenses, most recently since 2015, when their mobilizing under the banner of Fallism brought young people to renewed political and academic limelight. The discourses have been focused on the poor Black African youth, portraying them as either violence prone and entitled, or socially aware and politically engaged in new, unconventional ways. However, as my own PhD research with female students at the University of Johannesburg shows, the uneven speeds of socio-economic and political transformations in post-Apartheid era have resulted in complex, changing youth identifications and positionalities, which render mainstream category-based analyses unsatisfactory.
Drawing on focus group discussions and interviews with students, which I conducted in 2016-2017 for my PhD research on female political elites and empowerment, I argue that alternative and more productive analytical frames can be found in the students’ self-portrayals. Seeing themselves and others through the prism of education for example, students from various backgrounds differentiate themselves from others, both intra-and inter-generationally. The notion of being and becoming educated reveals concurrent forms of disempowerment and agency and it interacts with other identities, societal discourses and norms, such as being deserving through hard work. These norms are gendered, racialized, classed-based and sexualized and create structures, which allow a permissible level of individual change, while maintaining the systems of power intact. Thus, this paper demonstrates the benefits of alternative frames for intersectional analysis to capture the diverse experiences, hopes and grievances of students from the so-called Born Free generation, which can further inform other scholarship and policies.