Paper short abstract:

In this paper I explore teenage pregnancy as a means to revoke binaries such as childhood and adulthood, or tradition and modernity. By engaging with young people's attitudes toward their own identity, I suggest that they both resist and conform by available norms pertaining pregnancy.

Paper long abstract:

Macleod (2003, 426) suggests: 'the pregnant teenager is thus adult, but not adult, child, but not child, an undecidable'. Within this perspective, a pregnancy during teenage years corresponds to a breach of normative identity as sex and pregnancy are associated with adulthood. This is also situated at the crossroad between traditional approaches that value and encourage motherhood, and modern approaches, that consider education and employment as necessary pathways to adulthood.

In this paper I explore teenage pregnancy as a means to revoke binaries such as childhood and adulthood, or tradition and modernity. By engaging with young people's attitudes toward their own identity, I suggest that individuals navigate different regulatory frameworks in order to make sense of their lives, and the context they live in. This does not mean that identities are 'free-floating' (Humphreys, 2013), as they are constrained by social structures. By conjoining their actions within different normativities, young people render themselves intelligible via various discursive formations. By so doing, young mothers exert their own agency and suggest identities that both resist and conform by the myriads of regulatory frameworks that are available to them. In line with Aboim (2009), I depict a degree of complicity between the world of pre-colonial tradition, transposing into the modern world, but also one that is oriented by and to Western standards in both family life and gender relations. Change and continuity, in other words, coexist making it hard for one single normative hegemony to prevail over different regulatory sets.