Puberty in Crisis: The Sociology of Early Sexual Development

Celia Roberts

doi:10.1017/CBO9781316221853

Puberty has long been recognised as a difficult and upsetting process for individuals and families, but it is now also being widely described as in crisis. Reportedly occurring earlier and earlier as each decade of the twenty-first century passes, sexual development now heralds new forms of temporal trouble in which sexuality, sex/gender and reproduction are all at stake. Many believe that children are growing up too fast and becoming sexual too early. Clinicians, parents and teachers all demand something must be done. Does this out-of-time development indicate that children's futures are at risk or that we are entering a new era of environmental and social perturbation? Engaging with a diverse range of contemporary feminist and social theories on the body, biology and sex, Celia Roberts urges us to refuse a discourse of crisis and to rethink puberty as a combination of biological, psychological and social forces.

‘With characteristic, clear-eyed style, Celia Roberts negotiates the shoals of biological and social reductionism to give us a rigorous, richly entangled account of contemporary puberty. She clarifies the anxieties around the 'precocious girl' and identifies the many tributaries that feed the moral panic around feminine sexual development. This book should be read by anybody interested in a critical account of girlhood, the life course, sexuality, and the ways the biological and the social collaborate in the history of the body.'

Catherine Waldby - Professorial Future Fellow, University of Sydney

‘Puberty in Crisis is an important book which deftly navigates the complexities of sexed embodiment as situated, temporal and produced through notions of class, race, ethnicity and gender. The analytical matrix of ‘findings, feelings and figurations' keeps multiple narratives of the ‘crisis' of puberty in play, and urges an approach which can embrace diversity in sexual development. Exhaustively researched, engagingly written and brilliant in insight, it surely establishes Celia Roberts as one of feminist science studies' brightest stars.'

Barbara L. Marshall - Trent University

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Puberty in Crisis

The Sociology of Early Sexual Development

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Contents

Frontmatter
pp i-iv

Dedication
pp v-vi

Contents
pp vii-vii

List of figures
pp viii-ix

Acknowledgements
pp x-xii

1 - Puberty in crisis? Sex, reproduction and the loss of future
pp 1-29

2 - Articulating findings, feelings and figurations: methods and approaches
pp 30-50

3 - Telling histories: the scientific study of puberty
pp 51-90

4 - Defining early onset puberty: troubling findings about sexual development
pp 91-127

5 - Causes and explanations: genes, fat, toxins and families
pp 128-166

6 - Consequences of early development: sex, drugs and shortness
pp 167-196

7 - Treatments: pharmaceuticals, sex and suffering
pp 197-227

Conclusion: Folding puberty differently: changing findings, feeling and figurations
pp 228-240

References
pp 241-278

Index
pp 279-287

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Puberty in Crisis

The Sociology of Early Sexual Development

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