A Tangle of Discourses: Girls Negotiating Adolescence

Rebecca C. Raby
"A Tangle of Discourses: Girls Negotiating Adolescence"
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After explaining the five dominant, Western discourses of adolescence – the storm, becoming, at-risk, social problem, and pleasurable consumption, Raby begins to go into the interconnectedness of them. The opening few sentences of the section titled, “Living the Interconnections and the Clashes” made me begin to think about the importance of the five dominant discourses: particularly the importance of being able to go through all of these stages.

Of the five stages it seems that there is quite a bit of importance on becoming. “Less prominent in the more sensationalistic media, but nonetheless present in much literature on teens is the concept of teenagers as ‘becoming’, usually discussed in terms of self-discovery and/or identity formation” (p.433). What happens when a teenager is not allowed the room to explore and have this time of self-discovery? While I think Raby discusses this vaguely I did not grasp and real meat on this issue.

I would argue that when a teenager is not allowed to fully live into their own self-discovery they are more likely to partake in at-risk behaviors. The same could be said for young people who are not supported in their self-discovery or who experience some sort of hardship as a result of said self-discovery. The Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) is done throughout public high schools in the straight of Rhode Island. It looks at a variety of at-risk behaviors and compares the participation in those activities to heterosexual and gay/lesbian/bisexual/unsure (LBG/Unsure) youth.

What the study shows is that LGB/Unsure youth are more likely that their heterosexual counterparts to engage in at-risk behaviors. In every category LGB/Unsure youth are engaging more than their heterosexual peers. This is not true of two categories. The first is current alcohol drinking. Both groups scored at 34%. However, the confidence interval (CI) is greater for LGB/Unsure. This is to suggest that the reality of the situation is that more LGB/Unsure young people engage in drinking alcohol. The only are where heterosexual teenagers score higher than LGB/Unsure teenagers is in Dr. Check up. This is clearly area where score in a lower percentile is not a good thing. The YRBS shows that there is great risk for young people as a result of identity and issues related to said identity.

All of this plays into the concept of Agency that Raby discusses beginning on page 442. She defines agency as “the ability to make choice, to reflect on and influence one’s own actions, and to potentially make change in the world around us” (pg. 442). The YRBS suggests that there is a clear lack of agency amongst LGB/Unsure youth. If so much of the dominant discourses on teenagers is projections from parents and the larger society, it is clear why LGB/Unsure youth have a lack of agency. These dominant discourses seem to dominant in not only the range of acceptance among scholars but also a dominant ideology in their impact on teenagers today.

Questions/Comments/Point To Share
I wonder what happens when to this process - as set forth by the five dominant discourse - when a teenager does not clearly express one of the stages. For example the storm. What about the super involved, honor student, who looks likes s/he has it all together?