The Spectacle of the Child Woman: Troubling Girls and the Science of Early Puberty

Feminist Studies 44, no. 3. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 535 Carla Rice The Spectacle of the Child Woman: Troubling Girls and the Science of Early Puberty In 2007, pillowangel.org, a support forum documenting the life of Ashley X, received over two million hits after endocrinologist Dr. Daniel F. Gunther explained on CNN the growth attenuation treatment he had administered to Ashley X the previous year. In response to a desperate request from her parents, Ashley X, then a six-year-old severely disabled child from Seattle, Washington, was given high-dose estrogen, a complete hysterectomy, and a breast-bud mastectomy to prevent her transition to embodied adulthood.1 Parents and doctors defended the decision to arrest Ashley X's development and halt her physical growth, arguing that it would ease her transfer during caregiving, prevent the discomfort of big breasts and the messiness of menstruation, and shield her from abuse.2 It was felt that the interventions would match Ashley X's body to her mind, which experts considered to be at the level of a six-month-old, and halt her physical development, offering more congruency between her "childlike" mind and her body. 1. Eva Feder Kittay, "Forever Small: The Strange Case of Ashley X," Hypatia 26, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 623. 2. Daniel F. Gunther and Douglas S. Diekema, "Attenuating Growth in Children with Profound Developmental Disability," Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine 160, no. 10 (2006): 1013–17. 536 Carla Rice Ashley X's story was rife with controversy, but other families have followed suit.3 In fact, as disability studies scholar Alison Kafer notes, in their initial report on the treatment protocol for Ashley X, her doctors present her sterilization as an afterthought or a nonissue, so much was her body conceived as out-of-the-ordinary.4 Over the past twenty years, concern over what is seen as the premature development of young girls has captured the Anglo-Western cultural imagination. Not only has popular media been rife with feature stories about girls' coming of age "too early," but epidemiological research has focused much attention on the demographic makeup of girls' experiencing so-called precocious puberty—elevating this trend to pathological proportions. In public and professional spheres, the discourse has presented precocious puberty as a worrisome new public health problem to be prevented or overcome.5 The public's fascination with Ashley X represents a particularly vivid, perhaps maximal example of what sociologist Celia Roberts describes as "crisis articulations" surrounding early puberty in girls and what I deem to be an ongoing, visually fueled fascination with bodies conceived of as Other throughout puberty science's development in the twentieth century.6 In particular, concerns about disabled and racialized girls' untimely development have intensified over the past twenty years, evidenced by disproportionate attention given to race in puberty research and by controversial medical treatments used to arrest the sexed and sexual development of disabled children such as Ashley X. Unlike their male peers who have reportedly received less invasive treatments, disabled girls experiencing early puberty have been given full infantilizing surgeries.7 The implications of championing the need for a physiological and psychological "match" are particularly 3. Kristen Gelineau, "Family Makes Controversial Decision to Stunt Disabled Daughter's Growth," USA Today, October 26, 2015, http://www.usatoday.com /story/news/2015/10/26/disabled-girls-growth-stunted/74645194. 4. Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 57. 5. Sharon R. Mazzarella, "Coming of Age Too Soon: Journalistic Practice in US Newspaper Coverage of 'Early Puberty' in Girls," Communication Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2010): 36–58. 6. Celia Roberts, Puberty in Crisis: The Sociology of Sexual Development (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2015), 3. 7. Ravi Malhotra and Katharine Neufeld, "The Legal Politics of Growth Attenuation ," Windsor Review of Legal and Social Issues 34 (2013): 105–52. Carla Rice 537 deleterious when considered in the context of trans, aging, and disability studies perspectives. Medical imposition of mind-body congruency has severe repercussions for the sex and sexuality claims of those whose bodies and minds are not, in fact, "matched" according to normative standards (including trans people, people with disabilities, and adults living with...