Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses conceptualisations of adolescent sexual citizenship and pregnancy by the Brazilian state from 1989 to 2018 and finds that these are used to justify the control of this demographic's sexual conduct and result in social policies that ignore the complexity of their realities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how conceptualisations of adolescence and adolescent pregnancy by the Brazilian state between its democratisation and 2018 have shaped social policy addressing adolescent pregnancy. It aims to understand the legibility of this demographic group as specific types of citizens, and the construction of this supposedly apolitical public health problem. In doing so, this paper explores the construction and visibility of sexual citizens and their problems and how the ways in which they are seen justify measures of social control in Brazil. A Foucauldian discourse analysis of policy documents and a content analysis of public health indicators concerned with adolescent pregnancy between 1989 and 2018 show that adolescents' intersecting identities, characteristics of the men and boys who impregnate girls and the extent to which adolescent pregnancies were planned or not were key social factors that were ignored for many years. Moreover, adolescent pregnancy was largely medicalised and notions of adolescents as citizens in development were used to justify corrections of their sexual conduct for many years. This led to narrow social policy approaches to adolescent pregnancy which ignored the wider social contexts of diverse adolescents in Brazil. The results of this paper indicate that the state itself consists of various actors that can construct citizens and problems in different ways. They also show that defining an issue as apolitical and oversimplifying citizens' lives during data collection can lead to inadequate attempts to control citizens' conduct that are incompatible with their realities.

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