The governmentality of teenage pregnancy : scientific literature and professional practice in South Africa.
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Date
1999
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Abstract
Teenage pregnancy is seen, on the whole, by researchers and service providers as a social
problem. Various theoretical approaches have been utilised in the attempt to explain teenage
pregnancy, and to find 'solutions' to the problem. What is common to these approaches is the
assumption of the reality of teenage pregnancy, and the legitimation of the intervention of the
expert. This thesis is concerned with these fundamental premises of the scientific literature and
professional practice with regard to young women, their sexuality and reproductive behaviour.
A feminist post-structuralist approach, which draws on the insights of Derrida concerning the
absent trace and Foucault's analytics of power and governmentality, is taken. The tensions and
commonalities between feminism and a Foucauldian approach are explored, and a radically
plural post-structural feminism is explicated. The data used in this study consisted of South
African scientific literature on teenage pregnancy (the technologies of representation), and
transcriptions of interviews with service providers at a regional hospital (the technologies of
intervention). The bulk ofthe thesis is taken up with analysis of the first of these. The aims of
these chapters are to analyse how: (1) a range oftaken-for-granted assumptions or absent traces
regarding, inter alia, the nature of adolescence, adolescent sexuality, mothering, and family
formation and function underlie the scientific statements regarding the causes and consequences
of teenage pregnancy; (2) the governmental tactics of medicalisation, psychologisation and
pedagogisation are invoked in the literature with regard to teenage pregnancy; and (3) broader
governmental tactics (the familialisation of alliance, the conjugalisation of reproduction,
racialisation, the economisation of activity) are deployed in the literature to achieve particular
gendering, racialising and class-based effects. The section on the technologies of intervention
analyses how the governmental tactics described above are installed in the everyday lives of
teenagers and their families through the deployment of the mechanisms of security at the
interface between the service provider and the teenager or her parents. Finally, the undermining
of the assumption of the reality of teenage pregnancy, the link between expertise and
government, and the efficacy of the feminist post-structural approach are reviewed.
Description
Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1999.
Keywords
Teenage pregnancy., Teenage pregnancy--South Africa., Discourse analysis--Psychological aspects., Theses--Psychology.