Defining the pubescent body: Three cases of biomedicine's approach to 'pathology'

The pubescent body is usually represented as a body in tumult. For both boys and girls, although with quite different inflections according to sex, puberty is understood as a time of profound and irreversible change. For increasing numbers of children in wealthy countries, puberty is also associated with pathology and biomedical intervention. For these children, puberty comes too late, too early or is fundamentally undesired. In such cases, biomedicine offers pharmacological interventions to bring puberty on or to hold it off till later. Puberty thus becomes a medico-technical experience: a coming together of blood, guts and machines in challenging and highly consequential ways.