Teenage Pregnancy and the Construction of Adolescence

Abstract

The depiction of teenage pregnancy as a social problem relies on the assumption of adolescence as a separable stage of development. Utilizing a Derridian framework, the author analyses how the dominant construction of adolescence as a transitional stage: (1) acts as an attempt to decide the undecidable (namely, the adolescent who is neither child nor adult, but simultaneously both) - an attempt which collapses in the face of teenage pregnancy; (2) relies on the ideal adult as the endpoint of development; and (3) has effects in terms of gendered and expert/parent/adolescent power relations.