Puberty in Crisis

Celia Roberts is Senior Lecturer and Co-Director of the Centre for Gender and Women's Studies in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University. She is a long-standing editor of the journal Feminist Theory and author of Messengers of Sex: Hormones, Biomedicine and Feminism (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

• 1. Puberty in crisis? Sex, reproduction and the loss of future; 2. Articulating findings, feelings and figurations: methods and approaches; 3. Telling histories: the scientific study of puberty; 4. Defining early onset puberty: troubling findings about sexual development; 5. Causes and explanations: genes, fat, toxins and families; 6. Consequences of early development: sex, drugs and shortness; 7. Treatments: pharmaceuticals, sex and suffering; Conclusion: folding puberty differently: changing findings, feeling and figurations.

'With characteristic, clear-eyed style, Celia Roberts negotiates the shoals of biological and social reductionism to give us a rigorous, richly entangled account of contemporary puberty. She clarifies the anxieties around the 'precocious girl' and identifies the many tributaries that feed the moral panic around feminine sexual development. This book should be read by anybody interested in a critical account of girlhood, the life course, sexuality, and the ways the biological and the social collaborate in the history of the body.' Catherine Waldby, Professorial Future Fellow, University of Sydney