Power and visibility: The invention of teenage pregnancy

Abstract

The term 'teenage pregnancy' replaced the morally loaded terms 'illegitimate child' and 'unwed mother' around 1970. Instead of understanding the change in terminology as 'becoming more accurate', 'compelling more humane treatment' or simply as 'good', we should try to understand the meaning of the shift from treating pregnant adolescents as moral problems to treating them as scientific problems. Power organized around a moral discourse punished by exclusion, by placing its object on the other side of a moral boundary. Power organized around a scientific discourse on sexual desire makes its objects of knowledge visible and subject to unending inquiry. This paper explores the political implications of the emergence of this new form of power which disciplines its subjects not to obey the Law, but to become true to their own nature, a nature known by scientific experts.