Where inequality lives in the body: teenage pregnancy, public pedagogies and individual lives

Abstract

This paper is concerned with how inequality is lived in the body. I have written elsewhere about how teenage pregnancy-as both a public discourse and an individual experience—provides a compelling example of the ways that inequality is carried in bodies, minds, and hearts. The aim of this paper is to revisit my earlier analysis and consider more recent US media representations and political rhetoric about teenage pregnancy. I examine how two films—Juno and Precious—function as public pedagogies that orient young women to their bodies, sexuality, and maternal subjectivities in ways that continue to cultivate class and race inequality. I then consider an individual young woman's effort to make her pregnancy her own as a means to better understand the complex relationship between public discourse, culture, and subjective experience. By combining these two multiple levels of analysis, I wish to extend and complicate the way we conceptualize the formation of subjectivities.

Keywords:

• Teen pregnancy
• Media representations
• Sexuality
• Stigma
• Embodied inequality
• Formation of subjectivity