Mad, sad and hormonal. Riflessioni sul corpo dei preadolescenti e sulla costruzione dei saperi medici

The research project CorÂge is concerned conceptually with what it means to ‘do’ childhood in the blurred transition from child to teenage status, from 9 to 123 age old. The aims of this research is to reflect on the lived, bodily experience of this transition. The analysis presented here focuses on medical discourses and internet information concerning the onset of puberty, the physiological sign of passage between childhood and adolescence. It explores the relationship between puberty presented by pediatric literature mostly as precocious puberty, as a pathological condition and a gendered construction of female onset of puberty. By convention, normal puberty begins between age 8 and 12 years in girls and between 9 and 14 years in boys. The lower ages of normal pubertal onset recently has been challenged, but a consensus to accept puberty among young children without diagnostic evaluation has not been reached. A century-long secular trend reduced the age of menarche by about 17 to about 12 years. Reorganizing biological ages produces a briefer image of childhood, and anxiety in parents and society: in general, anxiety about girls sexuality has become rampant in wider cultural discourse, as debate about precocious onset of puberty in girls demonstrates. In web sites and psychological essays, often female physical maturation is cast as girls’ ticket of entry into the delinquent world of boys. The onset of puberty and preadolescence are assimilated to adolescence as risk state. Precocious puberty (especially in females) create an abundant medical literature. The mean age of adrenarche in females is also considered race-dependent, medical literature reports. Precocious puberty in African-American and in adopted children are both forms of building ethnic differences in growth, physiology, and are considered to put children health at risk in the future. A representation of an age at peril of dangerous behaviour (alcohol and drugs, dangerous activities, suicide attempts) is superposed by an image of dangerous age. I would argue that much like other aspects of identity, childhood is an inter subjective process of ‘becoming’ and that this process involves becoming gendered. In focusing on the intersection between these three dimensions of what it means to be a girl in contemporary society, to be a medicalised object and to be feminine, the female tween body is constructed and perceived as endered, ambivalent, by medicine and parents and by larger society.