Analysis Of A Tangle Of Discourses: Girls Negotiating Adolescence

Our first seminar for this half of the course began with a question of whether we define ourselves as either child or adult. As I answered that question for myself as a 44 years old; I was caught off guard, a little. Society would very quickly expect me to answer adult. However; I could not help but say both and my friends and family could attest to that. I suppose it surprised me at how quickly I chose ‘both’ as my answer. I was a bit conflicted and later wondered how it seemed unacceptable for me to claim that I was a child as well as an adult. Stereotypes are words used to generalize a group of people that have some similarities. As defined in lecture, a psychological approach, applying negative labels that are disconnected from society …show more content…
Raby, (2002) comments in the introduction of her article, A Tangle of Discourses: Girls Negotiating Adolescence that “Adolescence, in particular is a twentieth-century, Western phenomenon, linked to capitalist imperatives and consumer culture. Furthermore, when adolescence is framed as a predictable life stage, it also homogenizes a diverse and unequal group of people” (p. 425). Historically, the idea of adolescence was gradually being introduced in the late 1900’s due to changes in labour laws around children working on farms and in mines. The great depressions effect on jobs and value of money, as well as mandatory school for children were significant factors in this early cultural shift. To examine childhood historically, we are exposed to the social construction of childhood and come to understand the meaning of ‘child’ today. It also prompts us to learn and understand the concepts of, privilege, inequality, power, agency, identity, context, racism, sexism and homophobia and the external effect that this places on the development of