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Over a decade ago, Associate Professor Wendy Luttrell began work on an ethnographic study exploring pregnant teenagers’ perceptions of self, schooling, and motherhood. She spent five years in classrooms and parent-teacher conferences, on field trips and in one-on-one interviews, conducting exercises and reading journal entries of 50 girls in the Piedmont Program for Pregnant Teens. Below are excerpts from Luttrell’s forthcoming book, Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds: Gender, Race and the Schooling of Pregnant Teens (Routledge 2003), which chronicles this work, sheds light on the relationship of self-perception, pregnancy, and education, and critically examines the process of data collection and analysis in ethnographic research. (p. 148) I began the project wanting to learn about how the girls in the Piedmont Program for Pregnant Teens (PPPT) experienced the cultural phenomenon and social problem of “teenage pregnancy,” especially in the school setting. This interest paralleled my previous study where I sought to understand how black and white working-class women experienced the cultural phenomenon and social problem of “low literacy” and what a high school diploma meant to them. When I had asked the women to tell me about their school experiences in my previous work, they had responded with what I called a “narrative urgency” to tell me about what had happened in the past, especially events in childhood, to explain life in the present. My open-ended question, “Tell me what you remember about being in school,” was most often met with the comment, “You want to know about my childhood? I could write a book about that.” Among many things, these life stories were about how the women had learned to take on a subordinate position, and the powerful role they understood school to have played in this instruction. I (naively) assumed the PPPT girls would have a storehouse of life stories to share with me, that they would narrate their pasts in light of the present as the older women had. But I quickly learned otherwise. The girls did not claim that they could “write a book” about all the things that made them who they are today. I was surprised when I began my formal taping sessions that several girls said they didn’t know where to start or what to say. Their relationship to childhood events, often told in bits and pieces, were not unified or linked as the older women’s retrospective accounts had been. The PPPT girls did not draw lessons from this or that childhood event (consciously at least) as the older women had. *** (p. 149-50) It was in this context (and perhaps my own delight in the girls’ energy and playfulness) that I began to think differently about engaging the girls not as “informants” or “interviewees” who had “stories” to tell, but as improvisational actors whose performances held rich and multiple clues to the girls’ self- and identity-making process. Thus, I designed the role-play activity … as one way to tap into the girls’ experience of pregnancy. This activity provided what ethnographer Barbara Myerhoff called “opportunities for appearing.” … The girls made inventive use of these “opportunities for appearing,” performing imagined “others” and performing themselves as they are, as they wish they might be, and as they think others imagine them to be. Then, in this same spirit, I engaged the girls’ use of teen magazines and designed another opportunity for appearing by asking them to make collages answering the question, "Who am I?" Turning to yet another genre of self-representation, I engaged the girls as “book artists”—as illustrators and authors—asking them to make self-portraits and write about their (self) images.
*** (p. 48) It is difficult to collapse the vitality of these self-portraits into an analytic framework, because for each self-portrait there is a story. 50 self-portraits and 50 stories, each one distinct in its making and meaning. A girl might go through several iterations before she discovered what—or settled on how—she wanted to represent herself….
The group conversation that surrounded the making of the self-portraits, including my questions, often spurred a girl to see what she had made in a different light. After each girl finished her portrait, we would talk about it and I would ask both the “artist” and her “viewers” what they saw... Then I would ask a series of questions specifically related to the image; some were “aesthetic” questions about color choices, features of design, and perspective; others were anatomical questions about missing body parts or the varying size of body parts; and others were “autobiographical” questions about the people or places depicted in a picture. I always made a point to ask at least one question about a unique detail provided in a portrait. It wasn’t long before the girls would anticipate and imitate my questioning style with light-hearted laughter: “You know, Ms. Wendy is about to ask you about your picture, you better be ready.” Knowing that they were producing a collaborative book in which everyone’s work would be included meant that the girls often took on the role of “critic” of each other’s illustrations or texts. On a few occasions, classmates suggested that a girl needed to “work” more on her art form if she wanted them included in the book. But most often the girls asked for help from their classmates: “Who can make me shoes that will look right?” I actively encouraged and listened carefully to this group “critique” process and the debates it generated as a means to understand the girls’ struggles over self-representation. *** (p. 49-50) Most girls portrayed themselves in the present. 12 of the 50 PPPT girls portrayed themselves as children, ages four to eight (before the onset of puberty). I was struck by the fact that twice as many girls chose to portray themselves in the past, reflecting on their childhoods, compared to those who projected themselves into the future. Only five of the 50 PPPT girls made themselves “grown women” (in Ebony’s words); and three of those girls were Mexican American...In light of public discourses that cast pregnant teenagers as those who lack aspirations or a vision of their future or as “babies having babies,” I was curious to probe more deeply the meaning of the girls’ depictions of themselves in a past time. In their re-creations of childhood, each girl described herself in the language of ideal girlhood as “innocent,” “cute,” and “small.” Their reflections were nostalgic and evoked a sense of loss about the past. Their portraits of girlhood also sparked discussion among the black girls about beauty, fashion, femininity (what it means to be a girl), racial identity, and culture within African-American communities. Shannon’s picture of herself as a child is a good illustration. When I met Shannon she was fourteen, a “bright student,” who, according to Ms. Washington, was “going places before she became pregnant.” Shannon attended the PPPT program for a brief time—only the last three months of her pregnancy—after which she returned to her “regular” high school. Shannon’s self-portrait was unusual in that her paste-paper, cutout figure took up the entire page. Her picture featured an exaggerated head, with bright blue eyes (noticed by her classmates), and a hairstyle (with ribbons) that many of the girls recognized as one they had once worn. The clothes Shannon made for her figure were reminiscent of a midriff fashion many girls remembered wearing when they were “small” or “skinny.” Behind the figure Shannon pasted bright, multicolored stars. *** (p. 50) The girls were quick to respond to Shannon’s portrait and eager to share their own recollections of being cute and small; to express delight in the hairstyles they used to wear, sometimes lamenting the loss of this girlhood ritual. *** (p. 50-51) The girls’ portraits of childhood sparked many conversations about gender and racial socialization within their families and community. Childhood experiences of hairstyling were associated with feelings of “closeness, comfort and community,” racial pride, and maternal care. Perhaps in this way, the girls’ portraits of childhood are not only about the past, but also about the anticipation of the future world of motherhood, including its rituals of caretaking and racial socialization. ***
(p. 69) As I was reading her statement aloud, Michelle stopped me on the phrase; “I’ll never hold hatred toward my baby because I know it’s my fault and not my baby’s.” At this point in hearing me read her statement, Michelle said, “I know what I need to do,” and she picked up pieces of paper and started cutting out hearts that she placed in the empty space. Perhaps the hearts—symbols of love—were substitutes for Michelle’s feelings of hatred or aggression because these feelings were too painful or difficult to abide. Some viewers will see Michelle’s picture and notice the hearts, unaware that at first there was an empty space. Interpreting the symbolic meaning of these hearts is complicated given competing discourses about teenage pregnancy. On the one hand, one could interpret the hearts as illustrating Michelle’s “looking for love” by getting pregnant—a popular psychological explanation often offered to explain girls’ motivations for getting pregnancy. On the other hand, one could speculate that the hearts are symbols of acceptable, traditional femininity upon which Michelle might be drawing to defend herself against the “war on teenager pregnancy” and its stigma. All three of the above interpretations are plausible, but what the art making process and our conversation suggests is that Michelle was coming into consciousness about her conflicted feelings, that she would “hold hatred toward her baby,” and this made her want to change (in her words “fix”) how she feels and sees herself. In making her portrait, Michelle notices or becomes more self-aware of several things about herself and her life: her feelings of “emptiness” set next to “feeling something move inside you”; her fears of holding hatred toward her baby held alongside deep feelings of love; and her conflicting sense of her own value as both “miserable” and as worth “having somebody to really love and care for.” *** (p. 3) Teenage mothers’ motivations have…been scrutinized in ways that are racialized, class-blind, and, in far too many cases, stigmatizing. But how do pregnant girls themselves experience disparaging public attributions and directives that they are “babies having babies” or are “looking for love” in ways other than so-called normal mothers? Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds examines the experience of being a pregnant teenager as a struggle between a girl and her world, not simply within an individual girl. This distinction is ever so important if we are to avoid pathologizing and stigmatizing the life choices and trajectories of poor and working-class girls. Rather than focusing on individual girls and their “problem,” my aim is to consider the cultural and psychological mine fields through which they must walk, particularly within school settings. For More Information
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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