Abstract
Temporalities of cursed girls and leper boys: A critical analysis of growth, knowledge, and feelings in American puberty video discourse
American puberty videos, which introduce child audiences in late elementary or early middle school to the normative bio-psycho-social changes accompanying passage into adolescence, are pedagogical tools for early sex education that have achieved widespread circulation in the U.S. since World War II. Their ritualized viewership across multiple generations of developing children has contributed to the naturalization of a discourse about puberty. The current paper applies language socialization theory (Ochs and Schieffelin, 2011) and Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2010; Cameron, 2001) to eight puberty videos across a seventy-year timespan (1947 to 2016). Attending to the discursive structures and topics of the videos’ produced talk reveals three constituent but closely interwoven sub-discourses. These sub-discourses relate to (1) puberty as a phenomenon of children’s growth, (2) growth as a catalyst for new forms of children’s knowledge, and (3) new forms of growth and knowledge as sources of children’s feelings. Sub-discourses are differentiated by identifiable discursive strategies of temporal casting: on-screen children’s growth is cast into the temporal present, on-screen children’s knowledge is cast into the temporal future, and on-screen children’s and adult’s feelings pervade past, present, and future. Over the seventy-year period considered here, these unexamined temporal castings have produced a narrow figuration of puberty that invalidates children’s self-knowledge and peer-organized social worlds, reifies adults as the primary gatekeepers of puberty epistemologies, and installs distance between children and their changing realities. Rather than mitigate the potential crisis of being inherent in the child’s experience of development, American puberty video discourse has intentionally manufactured crisis and attached it to the enregistered figure of the developing child. The discursive patterns considered here render children’s development a temporally unstable phenomenon while foreclosing the possibility of variable gender and sexual developmental trajectories. This surprisingly stable discourse may not represent children’s actual experiences of puberty as much as it represents adult panoptical anxieties (Foucault, 1979; Ochs and Taylor, 1995) about the child’s changing form.
References:
Cameron, D. (2001). Working with spoken discourse. London: Sage Publications Ltd.
Fairclough, N. (2010). Critical Discourse Analysis (Second Edition). New York: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House.
Ochs, E. & Schieffelin, B. (2011). The theory of language socialization. In A. Duranti, E. Ochs and B. Schieffelin (Eds.), The Handbook of Language Socialization: 1-21. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Ochs, E. & Taylor, C. (1995). The ‘father knows best’ dynamic in dinnertime narratives. In K. Hall and M. Bucholtz (Eds.), Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self: 99-122. New York: Routledge.
Location and Address
Cathedral of Learning, 332