"A Tangle of Discourses: Girls Negotiating Adolescence" By: Rebecca C. Raby

The author in this piece did her own miniature study on 30 teenage girls and their grandmothers. Her goal was to help her get a better outlook on what she claims are the five discourses ( http://www.thefreedictionary.com/discourse) of adolescence. These include storm, becoming, at-risk, social problem, and pleasurable consumption. These are how teenagers may think of and speak about the world around us. Raby claims "adolescence is a clear, predicatable (but turbulent) stage that teenagers inevitably ://www.thefreedictionary.com/inevitably) undergo." In saying this she is saying we all have been there done that and had the same self conflicts resulting in these events (she calls these "key traits") . However these interviews show each teenage girl and descirbes their opinions of being a teen in their our own ways. We all have had our similar yet different experiences but not one of us will describe it in the same way.Ray does this study to show that all adolescents each in their own ways will go through these these discourses even though they each may express themselves differently along the way. Ray used the grandmothers along with the current teens for the interviews to see the effects of generation on this topic. Her method was as follows "By drawing on interviews with both grandmothers and granddaughters, I have been able to identify the diverse ways in which adolescents talked about across time, across identity positions (such as class and gender) that intersect with teenage hood , and between general references to adolescence as a category and particular referencees to individual teenagers." Her results came from very diverse groups aged from 13 to 19.

The storm and the becoming are more likely to be naturalized (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/naturalized) as inevitable, psychological and/ or biological features of adolescence. This is to say that these two dscourses are bound to happen and will commonly happen as the adolescent matures. In my Psychology class I learned about Erik Erikson (http://www.learningplaceonline.com/stages/organize/Erikson.htm). The author defines the storm as psychological and having stages like Erikson. Also, biologically teens go through hormone changes which also like the stages of development effect a teen and the way they look at life. I learned about Erikson and his stages in my Psychology class but Steinberg gives another outlook on teens and self identity that interested me "Parent;s probably project their own discomfort about adolescnce onto their children....as a way of avoiding facing the unrest they themselves feel about growing old." The Becoming interested me the most because it explains self discovery and identity formation. In doing she explains how the teen may end up confused because they are entering endependence yet they are dealt with much consequences to their actions. This is described as "Panoptic time." We expect so much from our teens yet we are educated enough to know that they are able to have an excuse because of their development. This quote interested me and it makes me feel like we ignore adolescnets sometimes "Child and teen desires, ideas and expereience may be consequently dismissed as irrational (

This You Tube video explains one teenage girls image of herself. I felt it relevant to this weeks article. This girl, like most at her age, is confused about her identity.