A Tangle of Discourses: Girls Negotiating Adolescence

Abstract

Drawing on material from 30 interviews with Toronto-area teenage girls and their grandmothers, the present paper reviews five discourses of adolescence: storm, becoming, at-risk, social problem, and pleasurable consumption. I explore how these discourses are invested, deployed and experienced in relation to each other and as they span academic texts, popular discourses, and interviews. I contend that these discourses make up a powerful discursive framework in which activity undertaken by adolescents can be swept up into these discourses, and consequently dismissed. At the same time, tensions or contradictions within and between these discourses, and within the entire category of adolescence as a stage, can in fact undermine the weight of these discourses as truth statements. I end the paper with some reflections on how each discourse constructs potential for agency, and/or resistance among teenagers.