A Genealogy of Puberty Science: Monsters, Abnormals, and Everyone Else

Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface and acknowledgements
1	Introduction: towards a history of the present
	Navigating ‘puberty’: from being a crisis to being in crisis
		Pubertal timing: ‘too late’, ‘too early’
		Earlier development: clinical implications and contentions
		Possible consequences and their clinical prevention
		Possible causes, alarming implications
		Puberty in crisis, knowledge in crisis
	On doing the genealogy of puberty science
		Subjects, events, and discourses
		Struggles and ‘subjugated knowledges’
		Puberty science: clinical and social
		The normal and the pathological
		Pubertal knowledge as scientific
		Speaking of change
		Setting-up, constructing, and reading the archive
	The book: parts and their chapters
		1 Precocious little monsters
		2 From biological to cultural monstrosities
		3 The surveillance of all
			Puberty as dangerous
			The Normal pubertal body
			Pubertal risk
PART 1 Precocious little monsters
	2	Child monstrosity and the dilemma of nature
		\'Remarkable children’: blending maturity and immaturity
			The benign monster: an ‘extraordinary’ excess of nature
		Assessing the child monster: able, reproductive, and disciplined?
			The reproductive girl child: healthy but at risk
			The monster’s challenge to morality and education
			The child monster as the precocious bearer of gender roles
	3	The monster, the modest girl, and the masturbating boy
		Boys: aroused, ‘seminal’, and masturbatory?
		What about girls’ sexual drives? ‘Modesty’
		Intimate bodies, intimate knowledges
		Monstrous bodies with abnormal drives: two powers, one subject
	4	Accounting for the mature-immature body
		Fantastical brains and actual tumours: discovering biological abnormality
			A case of exception: the doctor gazes at the dead body
		Family portraits: the hereditary-racial nexus
		Exogenous triggers: the problem of living conditions
			The nutritional hypothesis
			The instinctual hypothesis
			The environmental hypothesis
		Abnormal and biosocial: connecting the monstrous body to a new power
PART 2 From biological to cultural monstrosities
	5	From the world of the naturalists to the first population studies
		Pubertal medicine is called into the court
			Marital laws and family disputes
			Criminal matters: rape and infanticide
			Factory child labour and female pubescence
			Was Thomson’s knowledge up-to-date?
		Precocity and decay: pubertal timing as a scientific vocabulary of racism
			Pernicious habits, heat, and the natural precocity of the nègre
			New societies, old monsters
		Puberty science between scientific racism and colonial reform
			Roberton’s scientific and political standpoints
			Roberton’s hospital study
			Roberton’s comparative population studies
			From Virey’s racial determinism to Roberton’s sexual selection theory
			From monstrous bodies to the monstrosities of culture
			Roberton’s ‘internal’ racism
	6	The biosocial reconfigured: puberty onset and the emergence of epidemiological risk
		Pubertal timing and ‘the value of the numerical method’
			The continental revanche: climates, latitudes, and ‘the primitive power of race’
			Constitutional causes and the death of ‘temperaments’
			City life and the dangers of ‘civilisation’
		Factory work and the rise of an epidemiology of child development
			Factory environment and sexual prematurity
			Pubertal timing and the new science of growth: a missing link
			Factory work and girls’ pubescence: the reverse ‘truth’
			Whitehead vs Roberton: from a ‘graceful variety’ to the healthiest time of puberty
PART 3 The surveillance of all
	7	A most dangerous condition: puberty science and the surveillance of all
		Puberty is a ‘crisis’
			The Hippocratic ‘crisis’
			A new ‘hygiene’ for the pubescent: the modern ‘crisis’ of puberty emerges
		Pubertal morbidity and the school apparatus
			Pubertal growth and the discovery of the ‘spurt’
			Growth acceleration: auxological and clinical problematisations
			Morbidity without disease: the auxological discovery of ‘imbalance’
			Crises’ and ‘overpressure’: beware of girls’ schooling!
		The psychiatric ‘crisis’: from asylum medicine to the war with oneself
			The pubertal crisis and the onset of nervous and mental illness
			Hysteria, degeneration, and the instincts: the early 20th-century upgrade
			The ‘defective’ and ‘maladjusted’: pubertal crisis and the war against delinquency
	8	The birth of the ‘normal’ pubertal body (and its dilemmas)
		Pubertal standards and ‘physiological age’
			Growth standards and ‘maturity-grading’ criteria
			Metabolic standards and maturation
			From statistics to the clinic: theoretical and ethical complications
		Children-to-be-corrected: new ‘problems’, new dilemmas
			The rise of endocrinology and the death of child monstrosity
			New subjects to correct (or not!)
			Reviewing old monsters
			\'Constitutional’ precocity: the problematic of ‘true’ early development emerges
	9	Conclusion: puberty in crisis
		Catching up: from monsters, to abnormals, to everyone else
			Crises, corrections, and the ‘normal’ body
			New technologies, new dilemmas
		Standards and bio-history (according to Tanner)
			Staging the Scale
			Staging the Trend
			Troubling the Trend
			Puberty is in crisis!
			Explaining the Trend
		Treating for what? The precocious body as a ‘risk factor’
			Treating for the future. But what future?
References
Index