Pecha Kucha 3: Memories, photographs, and archives: On historicising ‘puberty’ in the present
- Authors: Pinto, Pedro
- Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/143937 , vital:38296 , https://ischp.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/ischp_2015_abstract_booklet.pdf
- Description: In 1997, Valerie Walkerdine incited researchers to use memory and fantasy as devices to explore the gendered meanings of being a child and becoming adult. Since we all once were children, we are in the ambiguous – and therefore productive – position of being both informants and ethnographers of childhood experiences. Whilst drawing on a historical investigation on puberty science, this presentation is a hybrid experiment: it combines my memories of growing up in Portugal in the early 1980s and photographs of children taken in clinical interventions from the late nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth. In articulating these materials and their different temporalities, my purpose is to explore the techniques and the power relations in which pubertal development came to being thought of, and disciplined, in contemporary societies. In doing so, I invite the possibility of historicising experience as a strategy to critically analyse our medicalised present.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2015
- Authors: Pinto, Pedro
- Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/143937 , vital:38296 , https://ischp.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/ischp_2015_abstract_booklet.pdf
- Description: In 1997, Valerie Walkerdine incited researchers to use memory and fantasy as devices to explore the gendered meanings of being a child and becoming adult. Since we all once were children, we are in the ambiguous – and therefore productive – position of being both informants and ethnographers of childhood experiences. Whilst drawing on a historical investigation on puberty science, this presentation is a hybrid experiment: it combines my memories of growing up in Portugal in the early 1980s and photographs of children taken in clinical interventions from the late nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth. In articulating these materials and their different temporalities, my purpose is to explore the techniques and the power relations in which pubertal development came to being thought of, and disciplined, in contemporary societies. In doing so, I invite the possibility of historicising experience as a strategy to critically analyse our medicalised present.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2015
Precocious little monsters and the birth of puberty science: tracing early puberty as a health matter
- Pinto, Pedro, Macleod, Catriona I
- Authors: Pinto, Pedro , Macleod, Catriona I
- Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/143626 , vital:38268 , https://ischp.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/ischp_2015_abstract_booklet.pdf
- Description: Over the last two decades, early puberty has been increasingly portrayed in scientific and popular arenas as an alarming health issue. Changes in pubertal timing are frequently accorded a range of medical and moral dangers, suggesting individual degeneracy and social crisis. In our presentation – the first output of a Foucauldian genealogical investigation on pubertal knowledge in medical journals – we show that today’s problematisations of early puberty are rooted in the figure of the child monster, as produced in early nineteenth century medical discourse. Drawing on doctors’ clinical encounters with the pubescent body as represented in medical journals during that period, we argue that puberty, understood as a scientific construct, has been ‘praecox’ since the beginning. From this genealogical viewpoint, we explore the ways in which our present ‘pubertal complex’ talks to an old medical dilemma: the confusion of maturity and immaturity within the young body.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2015
- Authors: Pinto, Pedro , Macleod, Catriona I
- Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/143626 , vital:38268 , https://ischp.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/ischp_2015_abstract_booklet.pdf
- Description: Over the last two decades, early puberty has been increasingly portrayed in scientific and popular arenas as an alarming health issue. Changes in pubertal timing are frequently accorded a range of medical and moral dangers, suggesting individual degeneracy and social crisis. In our presentation – the first output of a Foucauldian genealogical investigation on pubertal knowledge in medical journals – we show that today’s problematisations of early puberty are rooted in the figure of the child monster, as produced in early nineteenth century medical discourse. Drawing on doctors’ clinical encounters with the pubescent body as represented in medical journals during that period, we argue that puberty, understood as a scientific construct, has been ‘praecox’ since the beginning. From this genealogical viewpoint, we explore the ways in which our present ‘pubertal complex’ talks to an old medical dilemma: the confusion of maturity and immaturity within the young body.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2015
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