Across the global North, sexually developing female bodies are culturally troubling. Adolescent girls’ desire for new sexual experiences and potential to become pregnant are framed as problems requiring management through education, regulation and biomedicalisation (most notably via hormonal contraception). The reproductive capacities that are initiated in many – although not all – women at puberty are, like sexual intercourse, widely figured as something that should be ‘saved for later’, fulfilled only at an appropriate time. In biomedical and popular discourses such concerns also enact particular forms of sex/ gender, class and race: different worries become attached to particular kinds of bodies.

Most feminist research in this area addresses public debates around teenage pregnancy, birth and parenting, sometimes undertaking empirical work with young women in order to produce critical counter-narratives in the face of significant misogyny and ‘class disgust’, to use Imogen Tyler's (2008) term. In her classic book Feminism and Youth Culture (1991), for example, Angela McRobbie tells stories about teenage mothers living in a deprived area of south Birmingham. Unlike the selfish or ignorant victims portrayed in news media and reviled in television comedy (Tyler 2013), McRobbie's research participants are resourceful young women trying to get by in the face of severely limited opportunities for employment, education, and physical and social mobility. Spending time with these women and their families, McRobbie notes that ‘motherhood had pushed them towards a precocious maturity’; a maturity denied to their male partners who were unable to find paid employment (McRobbie, 1991: 227; see also Sharpe 1984). This experience of achieving maturity through motherhood is highly classed: the bodies of middle-class girls in contrast, as Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody's (2001: 215) interview-based research shows, have ‘to be regulated at all costs’ in order to avoid pregnancy and birth: indeed, pregnant middle-class teenagers are more likely to have an abortion than their working-class counterparts.