Girls, Adolescence and the Impact of Bodily Changes Family Dynamics and Social Definitions of the Female Body

ABSTRACT This article presents the results of a study concerning the impact of physical changes accompanying female puberty. It examines the meanings these changes have for the girls themselves, as well as for their mothers and fathers. The hypothesis, essentially rooted in psychoanalytical theory, is that the reactions of mothers and fathers to the bodily changes of their daughter communicate messages about these changes that, in turn, impact on the girl’s perception and experience of her body. These messages are influenced by the often unconscious desires, fantasies and fears of the adults as well as by societal gender images. Depending on how adult care providers confront the psychic issues raised by their daughter’s adolescence and, in turn, how they interact with their daughter during her transition to adulthood, these psychic events may either serve to perpetuate societal gender images or offer a means of revising them. KEY WORDS father–daughter relationship ◆ female adolescence ◆ female body ◆ female puberty ◆ menstruation ◆ mother–daughter relationship Contemporary German-language and Anglo-American discussions in the field of gender studies are dominated by social constructivist perspectives that pay little attention to the inner-psychic dimension in which the symbolic order and social relations are processed. The concept of ‘doing gender ’ in interaction theory, thus, analyses gender vis-a-vis social processes of performance and perception. What is not taken into account, however, are the inner-psychic effects and sources of these processes (e.g. for adolescents, see Thorne, 1993). Discourse theories (especially those drawing on Butler, 1993) work from the perspective of the construction of gendered bodies through discursive strategies without distinctly analysing the processes through which bodily perceptions, experience