Denaturalizing Adolescence

Abstract

This article critiques several taken-for-granted assumptions about adolescents' alleged distinctive nature and their universal, outside-of-history-and-society status. The article examines the social being of truth about adolescents by closely scrutinizing the confident characterizations that they are “coming of age,” controlled by hormones, and peer oriented. A major strategy of this rereading of adolescence is to locate the seemingly timeless characteristics of adolescence within the sociohistorical context of their creation: the late 1800s and the concerns within the United States for social order, virility, national and international expansion, and the participation of the sciences of anthropology, psychology, and child study in the social anxieties and responses. This analysis employs rhetorical, historical, and feminist readings to call into question the accepted discourse about adolescent nature.