Femininity and Adolescence

Abstract

This comment, made to me by a particular 15-year old girl, but echoing the general complaint of countless teenage girls down many generations, is the main theme of this article. I want to show that such a comment comes not from adolescent sulkiness or youthful paranoia, but that it reflects a real dilemma stemming from the fact that teenage girls are confronted by conflicting sets of expectations, which I shall characterise as expectations arising from the connotations we attach to femininit? and to adolescence ? I shall suggest that by understanding femininity and adolescence as discourse?, we may begin to uncover some of the traps we constantly set for teenage girls; and we may also throw some light on the difficulties and disappointments experienced by those who seek to work with teenage girls as, for instance, teachers and social workers. As well as showing some of the contradictory standards generated by these discourses, and the consequences of judging girls’ behaviour by the terms of one rather than the other, I shall explore femininity and adolescence as discourses with structured sets of relationships between speakers and actors who occupy positions in them. Also, I shall demonstrate that these discourses have both ‘professional’ and ‘public’ variants, using the expressions of teachers and social workers as examples of the professional aspect of the discourses and drawing upon teenage magazines to illustrate the discourses in their public variant. It is a central argument of this article that femininity and adolescence are subversiv? of one another, and in particular, that adolescence is subversive of femininity; young girls’ attempts to be accepted as ‘young women’ are always liable to be undermined (subverted) by perceptions of them as childish, immature, or any other of the terms by which we define the status ‘adolescent’.

Whatever we do, it’s always wrong.