Transforming Youth Identities: Interactions Across Races/Colors/Ethnicities, Gender, Class, and Sexualities in Johannesburg, South Africa

In South Africa, and especially in Johannesburg, apartheid's racial paradigms are being transformed. Fifteen years after the end of apartheid and the elimination of all forms of inequity based on notion of race, including the abolition of the Immorality Act of 1949 that prohibited mixed marriages, the discourses of youth challenge preestablished boundaries. Today, the South African Constitution gives people the right to proclaim their sexual orientation and to shape their own identities. Through ethnographic observations carried out in Johannesburg and in-depth interviews with young people, this paper explores transforming notions of identity based on race/color/ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality. The dynamics and challenges faced by young people with regards to mixed interactions in post-apartheid Johannesburg are analyzed and the paper looks at how race, gender, and sexuality interact in the various spaces in Johannesburg and how they affect young people's lives, particularly their perceptions of risk, violence, and HIV/AIDS vulnerability.