Abstract
Early onset puberty is increasingly prevalent among girls globally according to many scientists and clinicians. In the medical and scientific literature early sexual development is described as a problem for girls and as a frightening prospect for parents. News media and popular environmentalist accounts amplify these figurations, raising powerful concerns about the sexual predation of early developing girls by men and boys and the loss of childhood innocence. In this article the author frames one feminist approach to early puberty, arguing that feminist theorists should both take scientific work around population changes in sexual development seriously and use their critical skills to unpick and challenge the discourses constituting early development as a matter of concern. The author suggests that contemporary academic and policy debates on the ‘sexualization’ of girls have important resonance for critical explorations of early puberty. These debates currently pay little attention to the physiological aspects of sexual development and could be enriched by so doing. As in the case of ‘sexualization’, issues of class, racialization and agency are central to understanding and challenging normative concerns about girls’ early sexual development.
Anticipation, sex and science in girlhood
In a recent special issue of Subjectivity on feminist science studies, Vincanne Adams, Michelle Murphy and Adele Clarke (2009) provide a broad brush analysis of the contemporary moment, focusing on the significance of biomedicine and technoscience within it. In tune with several other commentators in science and technology studies (STS) and sociology, they characterize the current period of late modernity as shaped by discourses and practices of anticipation (others talk of promissory economies or the dynamics of hope) (Brown, 2003; Thompson, 2005). Adams et al. write,
Anticipation is not just betting on the future; it is a moral economy in which the future sets the conditions of possibility for action in the present, in which the future is inhabited in the present. Through anticipation, the future arrives as already formed in the present, as if the emergency has already happened. (Adams et al., 2009: 249)
Living in worlds constituted by anticipation means orienting practices, bodies and subjectivities towards the consideration of – and acting in relation to – the future. As Adams et al. suggest, this orientation produces new forms of responsibility, affectively driven by ‘entanglements of fear and hope’ (2009: 249): ours is a moral economy in which vigilance and action are mandatory. As Foucault (1987) argued for the modern era of bio-power, bodies, and indeed ‘life itself’ (or at least, today, ‘bits’ of these) (Smelik and Lykke, 2009), are at the heart of economies of anticipation. Technoscience and biomedicine, as many theorists have shown, have a major role to play in this: because, for example, we can produce embryos in the lab and remove one cell for genetic testing before deciding which embryos to use in an IVF cycle, we have the potential to anticipate (and act responsibly in relation to) the conception and birth of a child with a serious genetic condition. Because such ‘control’ is technically possible – empirically, as Franklin and Roberts (2006) have shown in work on this kind of medicine, such practices are also constituted by a lack of control and characterized by largely unsatisfactory outcomes – ‘life’ (in this case reproduction) and/or bodies are ethically taken in hand. Adams et al. talk about this demand for action in terms of ‘possibility’:
The palpable sense that things could be (all) right if only we anticipate them properly defines the way in which ‘possibility’ works here. Notions of global warming, precocious puberty, and genetic telescoping, for example, all work through anticipation to create the sense that the future is inevitable . . . in some senses already ‘here’ as a site for active intervention. It must not only be engaged, but also be engaged properly and effectively to avoid traumatic outcomes. . . . It is possible, so the injunction goes, to manage the anticipated. Vigilance is requisite. (Adams et al., 2009: 259)
Here, Adams et al. mention precocious puberty 1 as a ‘notion’ that creates a demand for action in the present in order to head off an anticipated and potentially traumatic future. But what are the futures envisaged in discourses of early puberty? Which embodied processes are involved in this ‘notion’? And how should feminists respond: should we refuse demands to act, or get involved? This article presents key elements of a wider project exploring early puberty. I begin by discussing a range of narratives figuring early puberty as a contemporary matter of concern. These narratives come from three key sites: news magazines, newspapers and online news sites; environmentalist websites and books; and scientific journal articles. I then move to the question of action: what kinds of response are demanded in these discourses? Finally, I turn to contemporary debates on ‘sexualization’ and girls’ sexuality in framing a possible feminist response to the ‘problem’ of early development.
Early onset puberty and the ‘problem’ of early sexual development
Adams et al.’s reference to precocious puberty stems from their focus on girls and girlhood in regimes of anticipation, particularly those pertaining to economic development. In tune with earlier work on girls by Anita Harris describing girls as ‘ideal flexible subjects’ for contemporary capitalism (2004: 8; see also Burman and Stacey, 2010), Adams et al. note the intense interest in girls as sites for the creation of (economic and social) development:
Girlhood is one site among many where distinctively gendered anticipatory regimes are at stake. In neo-liberal development regimes coalescing since the early 1990s, ‘girlhood’ has been identified as a crucial site for the creation of ‘human capital’. Human capital is intrinsically an anticipatory form, calling for investment in the skills and health of humans for the sake of greater returns towards GDP in the future. (Adams et al., 2009: 253)
These calls, they suggest, include exhortations to invest in the education and health of poor girls globally; practices of vaccinating girls against future STDs (the HPV vaccine); and educational discourses aimed at increasing awareness of the potential of domestic (endocrine-disrupting) chemicals to increase future cancer risk. Each of these calls focuses on girls’ future fertility: either to reduce that of poor and/or young girls or to ensure the reproductive capacity of other girls so they can reproduce at ‘the right time’.
In discourses of early puberty, as I show, concerns similarly congregate around fertility futures and the timing and appropriateness of (hetero) sexual activity for girls in different socioeconomic locations. Although there is no state-funded move in the above sense to invest in the management of girls going through early puberty, there are substantial cumulative discourses – produced in the fields of biomedicine, the news media and environmental politics – figuring early puberty as a problem of great contemporary significance. Early puberty is, as Adams et al. suggest, a ripe object for anticipatory regimes.
Anticipatory narratives: What kinds of futures are at stake?
Narratives of early puberty express and evoke anxiety and fear and produce calls for action. Even in the technically ‘dry’ rhetorical spaces of medical journals, one can find emotional descriptions of girls’ early development. Responding to an article subtitled ‘How bad can it get?’ in which the parents of a girl who started puberty at six-and-a-half describe their experiences, for example, the commissioning editor of the British Medical Journal’s Archives of Disease in Childhood sympathetically names precocious puberty a ‘frightening’ and ‘devastating’ condition (O’Sullivan et al., 2002: 321). In more public discourses, available on television, online and in the print news media, similar concerns abound. The very idea that ‘children’ might go through puberty is unnerving: puberty has long been seen as signalling the end of childhood, so its occurrence in middle childhood (6–8 years) disturbs our sense of the life course. In this, debate around early puberty resonates with broader contemporary concerns about ‘the disappearance of childhood’ (Postman, 1994 [1982]).
Worries about the loss of childhood are linked with moral concerns about precocious ‘sexualization’, linked in news media accounts with early sexual development. Media reports of scientific work on population changes in the timing of sexual development often refer to the possibility of sexual predation and abuse. On a US-based online news media webpage, for example, journalist Carol Wang cites endocrinologist Kevin Corley describing girls going through early puberty:
‘They’re not going to be emotionally ready to deal with it in many cases,’ expounds Corley. He also expresses concern with the kids fitting in with their peers because this change can be isolating. But there is an even more sinister concern, according to Corley. ‘It may also predispose some of these children to early molestation.’ He cites studies that suggest that the girls whose bodies develop early get unwanted attention and warns parents to keep their daughters wearing baggy clothing that doesn’t emphasize their bodies. (Wang, 2009)
Girls’ vulnerability is also figured in the images used to illustrate news articles on early development. In October 2000, for example, Time magazine featured early puberty as its lead story, depicting an alarmingly thin girl’s back and head. She is wearing a new white bra (shop tag still attached) and is gazing despondently at herself in a mirror. Large font postioned across her back reads ‘EARLY PUBERTY: Why girls are growing up faster’. Higher on the page and in smaller font, a set of questions attempt to engage the reader’s attention: ‘Is is hormones? Is it fat? Is it something in the water? How parents and kids are coping’. In the accompanying article, entitled ‘Teens before their time’, Michael D Lemonick et al. describe early puberty as a growing problem for American girls. After discussing the physical symptoms and associated risks of early development (breast budding, pubic hair growth, increased risk of breast cancer, loss of adult height), the authors focus most strongly on the psychosocial consequences of this experience:
Even more troubling than the physical changes is the potential psychological effect of premature sexual development on children who should be reading fairy tales, not fending off wolves. The fear, among parents and professionals alike, is that young girls who look like teenagers will be under intense pressure to act like teenagers. Childhood is short enough as it is, with kids bombarded from every direction by sexually explicit movies, rock lyrics, MTV videos and racy fashions. If young girls’ bodies push them into adulthood before their hearts and minds are ready, what will be forever lost? (Lemonick et al., 2000)
The tone here is both moralizing and nostalgic: the authors mourn a version of childhood that may be ‘forever lost’; a childhood in which girls had suitable interests (in fairy stories rather than sex) and looked like children rather than teenagers. In the same vein, they later describe childhood as ‘a time when life should be less about Eminem and more about M&M’s’ (Lemonick et al., 2000). This article evidences a high degree of ambivalence about early developing girls. Featured throughout as a sassy young woman who insists that her real name is used because the kind of sexual attention she receives is ‘such a source of pride’, for example, ‘Angelica Andrews’ laughingly describes boys as ‘like dogs’ in their pursuit of her. The journalists remain uneasy about this sexual pride and confidence however. Although quoting her boasts: (‘Says Angelica: “The boys tease me. They ask me, ‘Have you had plastic surgery?’ My friends get kind of jealous.”’) (Lemonick et al., 2000), they ultimately position Angelica as requiring parental surveillance to manage the effects of her developed body:
Angelica Andrews also has her parents watching out for her. Recently, the teenager experienced her first French kiss – but her family knew all about it, and the boy was immediately instructed not to call again until she was 16, or maybe 18. It’s unfortunate that such vigilance has become necessary for the families of many 12- and 13-year-olds, whereas a generation ago, most parents could relax until a girl was 16 or 17. But as Angelica puts it, ‘Welcome to the 21st century’. (Lemonick et al., 2000)
This uneasy mixture of old-fashioned sexual mores (the idea that parents can determine an age at which boys can call girls) and a realist sense of humour (Angelica’s ‘Welcome to the 21st century!’) is typical of mainstream media narratives of early puberty. The choice of image for the Time front cover, however, is alarmist and confusing. The child featured does not seem sexually developed but rather underweight: at first glance readers might expect an article on anorexia rather than early development (a condition, as discussed below, often associated with obesity). The girl’s bony back and shoulders and thin silver necklace denote fragility and vulnerability rather than the sassy sexuality in need of parental control articulated in the article’s text.
The demand for protection for early developing girls is widespread. Social scientific papers describing the psychosocial distress associated with early puberty figure girls’ early developing bodies both as direct causes of sexual desire and thus behaviour, and as triggers for the desires of others (men and boys). In a paper published in Women’s Health Issues, for example, Graber et al. (1999: 110) write,
Early maturing girls are more likely to be unprepared emotionally and cognitively for the changes of puberty itself and the social pressures that they may experience from boys and adults who perceive them to be more mature than their age and experience.
Psychologist Rachel Posner (2006: 316) similarly argues that scientific debates around early puberty are imbued with anxieties about adolescent women’s sexuality. Indeed, she asserts that ‘underlying the agenda of most of the research into the antecedents and consequences of early puberty has been a drive to control and limit adolescent girls’ sexuality. This line of research’, she continues, ‘has aimed to determine how sexual behaviour among adolescents can be prevented’ (Posner, 2006: 320).
The anticipated futures in narratives of early puberty also include physical problems. In the online news article cited above, Wang (2009) lists a series of alarming physical outcomes of early development:
Then there are the long-term physical consequences of precocious puberty. Among them, an increased risk of breast cancer, early menopause, brittle bones and stunted growth. It was the stunted growth that pushed Kate into seeking treatment for her daughter.
These concerns come from the clinical literature, which describes early maturing girls’ loss of adult height (e.g. Carel et al, 2004; Mul and Hughes, 2008; Phillip and Lazar, 2005) and their increased risk of cancer (e.g. Brito et al., 2008; Stoll, 1998). In most popular accounts, however, these concerns about physical effects are secondary: the broader issues about the loss of childhood remain paramount.
Environmentalist literatures also figure early puberty as an unfathomable loss, concentrating on links between precocious sexual development and the ubiquity of toxic chemicals. In her popular book, Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis, for example, biologist and environmentalist Sandra Steingraber devotes a chapter to early development. Describing her reaction to scientific papers on the effects of environmental toxins and sexual development, she argues that early puberty both threatens the loss of children’s connections to ‘life itself’ and invokes the spectre of sexual molestation:
Surely, what makes these topics so profoundly disturbing is the juxtaposition of something public, noxious, and invasive (chemical contaminants) with something that verily defines the words private, innocent, and off-limits (the reproductive organs of infants and children). We are talking here about threats to that part of my children that I am charged, above all else, with safeguarding: their sexuality, their fertility, their connection to future generations, and thus to the abiding, ongoingness of life itself. These are the body parts about which the necessary motherly refrain is This is private. This is just for you. No one else is allowed to touch you there. (Steingraber, 2011: 239, italics in original)
Across a range of discursive fields, then narratives of early puberty consistently describe concerns about a future that should be acted upon now. As Adams et al. argue, such narratives telescope the future back to the present, demanding action in order to prevent disaster. In the case of early puberty, the bodies and lives of girls, childhood more broadly and even humanity’s reproductive futures are said to be at stake.
News media articles on early puberty are usually stimulated by press releases describing the results of scientific papers published in leading journals. Scientific research on early puberty provides rich materials for journalists: debates in the field demonstrate a high level of disagreement and tension, both about findings and their implications. Indeed, scientific contention in this field is itself a matter of public debate in the United States: media reports and popular books enthusiastically describe serious arguments between leading American researchers (Kolata, 2001a, 2001b; Kaplowitz, 2004). In the following, I describe the arguments of some of the key articles in the field, 3 outlining the ways in which early puberty has been enacted scientifically as a matter of concern. My selection here is restricted: I discuss a broader range of scientific literature in greater depth in the book I am currently writing on this topic.
The most commonly cited study claiming a significant change in age of pubertal onset is Marcia Herman-Giddens et al.’s paper ‘Secondary sexual characteristics and menses in young girls seen in office practice: A study from the Pediatric Research in Office Settings network’ published in Pediatrics in 1997. The authors examined the clinical records of 17,077 North American girls, 9.6% of whom were African-American and 90.4% white and found that the mean age of puberty for white girls was 9.96 and for African-American girls, 8.87. At age 8, 48.3% of African-American girls and 14.7% of white girls showed pubertal maturation, and at age 7, 27.2% of African-American girls (but only 6.7% of white girls) had begun development. In other words, almost a third of the African-American girls had started puberty by their seventh birthday. 4 Importantly, the majority of these girls did not start menstruating earlier than their counterparts (mean age was still 13); so instead of experiencing 2 years of the first stages of puberty, these girls had 3–5 years. 5
This paper created much controversy and lead to a flurry of related articles in the journal Pediatrics, some disputing these findings. In 2004, Herman-Giddens et al. published a commentary on this spate of articles. Asserting again that the norms of puberty had changed, Herman-Giddens et al. suggested a revision of existing clinical guidelines defining early puberty, arguing strongly that ‘Primary care physicians should not blindly use the age of the child as a rote guide for referral’ for treatment (2004: 915). If all girls starting puberty before 8 were referred for treatment, they contend, there would simply not be enough resources to treat them. While they accept that the trend towards early puberty may not be ‘normal’ (i.e. the new norm may be pathological), demands for treatment must be managed in relation to population numbers (see also Kaplowitz et al., 1999).
Herman-Giddens et al.’s work focuses on the United States. In 2009, a well-cited paper in Pediatrics by Aksglaede et al. examined changes in puberty in Europe, reporting a similar trend. In this study of 2095 Danish girls, breast development in 2006 was found to start on average at 9.86 (compared to 10.88 in 1991) and age of menarche also slightly decreased (from 13.42 in 1991 to 13.13 in 2006) (Aksglaede et al., 2009). Importantly, these changes held true when BMI (body mass index) was controlled for, so the authors suggest that ‘other factors yet to be identified may be involved’ (Aksglaede et al., 2009: 932).
As this statement indicates, the causes of these trends towards early puberty remain unknown. Hormonal changes are clearly at stake in early puberty – puberty is physiologically constituted by a set of hormonal ‘cascades’ originating in the brain and circulating between the brain and the reproductive organs – but what triggers these cascades (either in ‘normal’ puberty or early puberty) remains a scientific ‘mystery’ (Roberts, 2010a). The proposed and analysed causes of early development are diverse, ranging from environmental toxins (found in cosmetics, food, plastics, furnishings) to absent fathers; from the actions of particular genes and genetic pathways to ‘unhealthy lifestyles’ (poor diet, inactivity, watching too much television). The role of serious psychosocial stress, such as that involved in international adoption is another factor (internationally adopted children tend to go through puberty earlier than their peers in their country of origin and their adoptive country), as is obesity (see Throsby and Roberts, 2010). Questions of racialization are important in these elaborations of cause: as mentioned above, African-American girls are said to be more likely to go through puberty early than their white American counterparts. This finding raises complex questions about the biological and developmental effects of racism. Questions of social class and economic deprivation are not often mentioned in the literature despite, as discussed below, their apparent significance. Scientifically, then, early puberty constitutes a site of intense interest and investment – the studies investigating it are large scale and the debates highly active – and yet of substantial uncertainty.
Market opportunities and therapeutic actions: What should be done for early developing girls?
As Adams et al. point out, scientific uncertainty only serves to feed regimes of anticipation and their associated affects of fear and hope. For clinicians, not understanding the causes of early puberty does not constitute a reason to refrain from intervening in it. While the causes of puberty are poorly understood, the biochemical processes involved are not: technologies (hormonal implants, injections and nasal sprays), consequently, exist to intervene in these. Puberty can be stopped, held off, ‘controlled’.
Early developing girls, then, constitute an expanding market for pharmaceutical products. The main drug used to halt early puberty – Lupron – affects gonadotropin-releasing hormones in the brain, preventing the secretion of hormones that provoke sexual growth in the ovaries or testes, thus holding off puberty until treatment ends. This drug is also used in breast and prostate cancers, to treat endometriosis and fibroids, to control ovarian activity in IVF and to ‘castrate’ adult male offenders. Its delivery involves daily injections (described as painful), nasal spays (used three to six times daily) or, most commonly, ‘depots’ (capsules injected into muscle that slowly release the medication over a month) (Hirsch et al., 2005). Shortly after the Lupron depot was approved for use in precocious puberty, a leading clinician in the field warned that, ‘These agents have the potential to be over-prescribed’ (Rosenfield, 1994, cited in Kaplowitz, 2004: 142) and insisted that clinicians should carefully consider whether the wellbeing of the child was compromised by their early sexual development and if their quality of life would be improved by taking Lupron. Clinician Paul Kaplowitz, contributor to the Herman-Giddens papers and author of Early Puberty in Girls: The Essential Guide to Coping with this Common Problem (2004) agrees that great caution should be exercised in prescribing this medication. In his book for parents, Kaplowitz notes that if he can allay the child and parents’ concerns with information and talk, ‘they usually opt for no treatment’ (Kaplowitz, 2004: 147). In describing this approach, Kaplowitz distinguishes himself from ‘some of [his] . . . colleagues [who] are in such a rush to start girls on treatment before they are even sure what they are treating’ (Kaplowitz, 2004: 149).
Early developing girls also constitute new markets for everyday consumer products: bras, clothing and sanitary pads. Independent companies in the US have been quick to spot a new opportunity: one offers ‘Period Packs’ aimed at the early developer: pink gift boxes including a ‘smencil’ (scented pencil), scented lip gloss and nail polish along with chocolates and sanitary pads (www.periodpacks.com/). In her accompanying blog, company director Wendy Bulawa Agudelo discusses ‘the latest research’ on the psychological effects of early puberty, alongside less serious entries on the joy of eating chocolate (chiefmaxi.wordpress.com/). This site and others like it deliberately target younger developing girls and their worried mothers. In the wider arena of high street retail chains, selling clothes to ‘tween-age’ girls has become a fraught and contested practice. The marketing of certain kinds of bras and bikini tops (deemed too ‘adult’) to children in this age range has been fiercely debated in the British, American and Australian media: companies selling such products have been subjected to successful boycotts and forced to remove ‘inappropriate’ products from their shelves (news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8521403.stm; Andrusiak, 2009; Channel 4, 2010). In Sweden, too, bikini tops for 1- to 2-year-olds were removed from stores after criticism from a Norwegian cabinet minister (idreamofbaby.com/forum/showthread.php?148050-bikinis-for-toddlers-young-girls-sexualizing-them). Although such items may not have been produced with early developing girls in mind, the strong public response to their appearance needs to be considered in this context.
Learning from the ‘sexualization’ debates: How might feminists respond to early puberty?
To date, there has been scant public policy debate or feminist research on early sexual development. This is in stark contrast to the flourishing debates on the ‘sexualization’ of girls. While these are not synonymous, they overlap and intersect as matters of concern. ‘Sexualization’ has been variously defined in policy documents coming from the UK, Australia and the United States but usually refers to the social inculcation of an adult form of sexuality in young girls. As feminist commentators have argued, these policy documents figure girls as relatively passive recipients of external social forces rather than active and desiring participants in sexual cultures. Sociologists R Danielle Egan and Gail Hawkes (2008a: 293–294) write, for example, that ‘The discourse of sexualization promotes a mechanistic and passive construction of the child. As a result, the discourse on sexualization fails to acknowledge the complexity and multiplicity of reader response and ignores how children might submit to as well as subvert particular cultural messages as well as forms of fashion and commodification’ (see also Attwood and Smith, 2011; Bray, 2008; Egan and Hawkes, 2008b; Hawkes and Egan, 2008; Harris, 2009; Renold and Ringrose, 2011). Empirical studies in various countries have shown that girls do actively engage in and sometimes resist ‘sexualizing’ discourses: drawing on ethnographic data about three British girls, for example, Emma Renold and Jessica Ringrose argue for a Deleuzian theorization of their relation to contemporary sexual cultures. Troubling binary logics of passivity versus empowerment, they argue that these girls navigate and perform ‘new schizoid formations of subjectivity’ (Renold and Ringrose, 2011: 403), both expressing ‘female desire’ and being ‘caught up in’ limiting models of it: embracing the term ‘slut’ to avoid sexual regulation, for example (Renold and Ringrose, 2011: 404).
Policy documents describing sexualization have had surprisingly little to say about early puberty. Linda Papadopoulos’s 2010 Sexualisation of Young People Review commissioned by the UK Home Secretary; the American Psychological Association’s 2007 Report of the APA Taskforce on the Sexualization of Girls; and the Australian discussion paper on corporate sexualization by Rush and La Nauze (2006) all figure the sexualization of young people as a problematic social and commercial phenomenon that should and could be resisted. Scientific and medical debates around early puberty and accelerated sexual development, however, are largely absent from these public debates: the word ‘puberty’ is mentioned only once in Papadopoulos’s 104-page review, while David Buckingham’s 2009 report on The Impact of the Commercial World on Children’s Wellbeing flatly refutes claims of increasing rates of early puberty: ‘Despite popular beliefs, young people are not maturing earlier than 50 years ago, although there was a significant fall in the age of menarche in the first part of the twentieth century’ (Buckingham, 2009: 116). Reg Bailey’s 2011 report for the Coalition government, Letting Children Be Children, was the first policy document to link early puberty with sexualization. Citing Buckingham’s now revised view, Bailey writes,
Girls are, on average, reaching puberty at an earlier age now than ever before. In the UK, girls can now expect to reach puberty, defined as the development of breast buds, around their tenth birthday, and, on average, girls have developed more evident breasts by 11.6 years of age. That means that today these developmental stages are reached a year to 18 months sooner than at any time over the past 60 years (Rubin et al, 2009). We need to see concerns about the premature sexualisation of children through inappropriate clothing and other products against this backdrop. Professor David Buckingham, in a book to be published in 2011, considers the issue of whether, as well as society being increasingly sexualised, this lowering of the age at which children reach physical and sexual maturity provides a biological driver towards them seeing their potential as sexual beings at a younger age. (Bailey, 2011: 44)
While I would question the notion of ‘a biological driver’ – for me, early puberty cannot be understood as simply ‘biological’ – this change reflects arguments I have made in earlier spoken versions of this paper (Roberts, 2009, 2010b) and which I want to elaborate here. Indeed, one of the key aims of my broader project on early puberty is to bring the relevant scientific and biomedical debates into critical conversation with wider public concerns about girls’ sexuality.
As in the policy debates, early puberty is only very rarely mentioned in more critical work on sexualization. While strongly criticizing normative theories of sexual development, feminist researchers in this area typically remain on behavioural and/or psychological terrain, leaving physical development aside (see, for example, Hawkes and Egan, 2008a: 199; Renold and Ringrose, 2011: 4). In occasional brief passages Egan and Hawkes do suggest that those worried about sexualization should pay more attention to physiological aspects of sexual development, writing, for example, that ‘Sexualizing materials are conceptualized as incendiary objects that provoke and inflame the sexuality of girls . . . Disengaged from physiologic considerations of puberty and the shifting age of onset; the risk of sexualization lies in its capacity to awaken a dangerous realm of sexual expression’, and similarly, ‘Although the authors [Rush and La Nauze] evade a discussion of physiological maturation, the direction of their research and the concerns voiced therein suggest that they are not worried about the onset of puberty’ (Egan and Hawkes, 2008b: 310). Despite this criticism, Egan and Hawkes do not pay attention to physiological matters in building their own arguments: physiological development in this otherwise rich and convincing work remains a kind of black box, an unreferenced fact. It is this black box that I want to open up for feminist exploration.
Broader feminist collections on girls and sexuality are also relatively silent when it comes to early puberty. Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff’s (2011) excellent collection of essays on ‘new femininities’, for example, makes no mention of puberty, menarche or sexual development, focusing instead on cultural representations, social experience and subjectivities relating to girls’ sexualities. In their introduction to an earlier collection on the rise of ‘tween cultures’, Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh (2009 [2005]) do, rather tentatively, mention early puberty as a response to neoliberal consumer cultures and their focus on the sexualization of 6- to 10-year-olds. Although the point is not elaborated, Mitchell and Reid-Walsh bring the issue of media representations of early sexual development into the frame, suggesting possible connections between reports of early puberty and the marketing of products for ‘tween-age’ girls:
It appears that a market construction has somehow anticipated or is at least paralleling a physiological one. In some cases, western concerns about ‘death of childhood’ and ‘hurried childhood’ seem to be coming true for some western and westernized girls, as they have always been for the majority of girls in developing countries throughout the world. (Mitchell and Reid-Walsh, 2009 [2005]: 14)
Elizabeth Seaton’s chapter in this volume, unusually, goes further, and begins to engage with the scientific literature on early puberty. Using Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and citing some of the scientific debates on the decline in age of pubertal onset, Seaton (2009 [2005]: 38) asks, ‘Does early puberty involve a habituated and strategic response to the uncertain terrain of neoliberalism?’ This intriguing question remains unanswered.
Searching further afield for feminist work on early puberty, I came across a paper by US-based women’s studies academic Kristina Pinto (2007) published in The Journal of Early Adolescence. Entitled ‘Growing up young: The relationship between childhood stress and coping with early puberty’, the paper reports on a qualitative, interview-based study with 16 African-American and white girls. Here Pinto comes to the stark yet compelling finding that for girls living very stressful lives, the experience of early puberty is not particularly disturbing. Defining stressful lives as involving, for example, losing parents, being sexually abused or experiencing serious psychiatric problems, Pinto finds that such experiences tend to produce a demand on girls to ‘grow up young’ in any case. At young ages, the girls in her study became aware of cruelty and social suffering, had to take on heavy social responsibilities, and/or were left to fend for themselves in unsafe situations. When puberty came early too, then, it was experienced either as just another issue to deal with (and a relatively minor one at that) or, more positively, as a physical embodiment of a sense of being more grown up than age-peers, a kind of physically recognizable sign of an already burgeoning maturity, brought on by adversity (Pinto, 2007: 531). Pinto writes,
To summarize the experiences of these inspiring girls, their narratives indicate that a history of childhood adversity can mediate the salience and meaning of early puberty for girls when the stressors occur in proximity to the onset of puberty. Although stress served as a distraction from the significance of puberty or the risks associated with early timing for some girls, other girls noted that the developmental demands of early psychosocial adversity moderated the psychological difficulties often associated with early puberty. This is not to imply prior stress was unequivocally beneficial. (Pinto, 2007: 531)
As I have argued above, scientific, news media, environmentalist and public policy debates around early development and sexualization tend to represent all young girls as sexually innocent and thus requiring protection from (their own and others’) sexual desires. Pinto directly challenges this representation, writing ‘The effort to protect the inexperience and naivete of girls assumes . . . that the young are unknowing of cruelties familiar to adults’ (Pinto, 2007: 509). After analysing the narratives of development provided by the girls in her study, she returns to this issue:
. . . if puberty is cast as a crisis, early puberty is popularly considered to be psychologically and behaviourally endangering, akin to the sexualizing of a child. The narratives of the girls in this study suggest, however, that the puberty-as-crisis paradigm might not apply to some early developers who confront childhood developmental demands that accelerate the maturation process, whether socially, behaviourally, or intrapsychically. (Pinto, 2007: 532)
This research, as Pinto (2007: 535) briefly points out, also challenges the literature on the psychological and social effects of early puberty at a deeper level. Citing the biomedical claim that childhood stress (caused, for example, by international adoption) can ‘precipitate’ early puberty, she asks whether existing studies of the effects of early puberty might not be regularly confounded by not controlling for such stress. That is, if childhood stress is correlated to behaviours such as drug-use and sexual activity and early puberty, how can the claim be made that early puberty is the cause of these behaviours? It would only be if thoroughly ‘innocent’ girls going through early puberty engaged in such behaviours that such a claim could be made. Pinto concludes that ‘puberty implicates other narratives and does not operate independently’; there is, she argues, ‘reciprocity between physical, emotional and cognitive development’ (Pinto, 2007: 535–536). Thus, for her, ‘puberty is not a singular and discrete catalyst for maturity and gender identification following the closure of childhood, but rather an outpouring of the past, channelling into womanhood’ (Pinto, 2007: 536).
Pinto’s research provides excellent direction for feminist work on early puberty. Her refusal to lump all ‘girls’ into one category and her careful attention to how particular life experiences intersect with sexual development for me resonate with a science studies approach that highlights the specificities of scientific knowledge production and the careful examination of the ways in which biological bodies are enacted across a range of sites (clinical, scientific and others). It also chimes with Egan and Hawkes’ (2008a: 318) suggestion that work on ‘sexualization’ should pay attention to the specificities of particular groups of girls’ experiences. In terms of regimes of anticipation, Pinto’s work highlights the importance of resisting overarching discourses of alarm about early sexual development, instead contextualizing such development in the life histories of particular girls. Socioeconomic deprivation or childhood neglect, for example, may play important roles both in how sexual development is experienced and in when it occurs. Experiences of racism may also have related embodied effects.
Engaging the politics of hope
In their conclusion, Adams et al. (2009) discuss the possibilities of refusing anticipatory regimes, of strategically ‘not-anticipating’. ‘Or perhaps’, they continue, ‘a better tactic is not to refuse anticipation as such and instead charge ourselves as accountable to anticipation. . . . Instead of ceding the injunction to anticipate, one might ask what kinds of desirable accountabilities to and kinships with the future might be fostered through such work’ (Adams et al., 2009: 260). How might such accountabilities be articulated?
In this article I have introduced the scope and orientation of an ongoing feminist project on early puberty which I hope will have resonance for others interested in this field. My research in this area builds on a feminist science studies tradition that pays careful attention to the arguments produced in scientific work, taking expert knowledge about biological actors and processes seriously. As I have begun to show above, such attention involves close engagements with scientific knowledges and practices. Such engagement remains a matter of some controversy in feminist studies: see for example, the debate in this journal between Sara Ahmed (2008), Iris van der Tuin (2008) and Noelle Davis (2009). A conversation published in a recent special issue of Feminist Theory also addresses this topic (Kirby and Wilson, 2011). Although asserting that ‘Feminist work is at its strongest . . . when it is able to work with, rather than against, scientifically generated theories and data’, Elizabeth A Wilson here notes that she is ‘increasingly concerned that there is now a tendency to simply flip these politics around, and to side with scientific data in a very literal kind of way’ (Kirby and Wilson, 2011: 233). Articulating a route through this polarized minefield, Wilson argues that ‘[scientific] data given empirically or experimentally are mobile, contradictory, and contingent, rather than fixed. Those contingencies can be highly stable – spreading out over long periods of time and across a large number of places – but they are contingencies nonetheless, and as such warrant neither refusal nor reverence’ (Kirby and Wilson, 2011: 234). In this article I have argued for such an engagement in the field of early puberty: I think there is value in feminist theorists, policy-makers and others interested in girls’ sexual development in taking scientific work in this field seriously. Correlatively, I suggest that feminist theorists and social scientists have much to offer scientists and policy-makers working on early puberty: we have tools to expose and explore the assumptions and anxieties underpinning much of this work, and strategies to elaborate more complex theorizations of the intra-actions (Barad, 2007) of bio-psycho-social processes and actors constituting sexual development.
Like policy and public discourses on ‘sexualization’, news media, scientific, clinical and environmentalist discourses around early developing girls produce narratives of sexual vulnerability and disturbing loss of innocence. In line with contemporary feminist work on ‘sexualization’, I want to argue that becoming accountable for anticipating girls’ futures differently means challenging this conflation between sexuality and danger and loss and avoiding figuring early development in inherently negative terms. Articulating a feminist response to early puberty requires noticing which girls are figured in discourses of early puberty and critically tracing how concerns about ‘premature’ sexual development might build on discriminatory discourses around class and race. Learning from Pinto and feminists working ethnographically on ‘sexualization’, such a response might also involve empirically exploring how particular girls live early sexual development. Additionally, however, I want to suggest that moving closer to the biomedical and scientific discourses articulating early puberty will help feminist theorists engage critically with the evolving clinical and cultural practices forming this phenomenon and broader contemporary sexual cultures.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the ‘Young Women in Movement: Sexualities, Vulnerabilities, Needs and Norms’ ESRC Seminar Series, Goldsmiths College, 24 November 2009 and the CIRCL seminar, Reading University, 2 March 2010. Many thanks to the organizers of these events for inviting me, and to the participants for their questions and comments.
Funding
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement No. 263657, PPPHS.