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BOOK REVIEWS

Perspectives on Pedagogy

Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds: Gender, Race,and the Schooling of Pregnant Teens. Wendy Luttrell. New

York: Routledge, 2003. 238 pp. $25.95 (paper).

AMEE ADKINSIllinois State University

“What would schools look like if educators took a stance of interest and curios-ity rather than discipline and punishment toward girls’ fertility” (Luttrell 2003,177)? Among the many features of Wendy Luttrell’s ethnography that led me towrite this review, this question stands out as a compelling and profound contribu-tion. It is a simple question, but it opens immense possibilities for young peoplewho are marginalized in our schools.

The question frames a struggle in my work with aspiring teachers and adminis-trators. I work to corral their urge to rush to judgment, especially regarding vulner-able populations, and to disrupt their tenacious hold on entrenched educationalpractices that serve many interests, but often not those of youth in schools.Luttrell’s question has become my new mantra when exploring cultural conflict inschools, and her account of the experiences that follow from such a question por-tray in vibrant detail the humanizing effects it sets in motion.

Pregnant Bodies originates from the problematic effects of labeling that unwit-tingly structures our lives. While Luttrell shares her engagement with “the PPPT[Piedmont Program for Pregnant Teens] girls,” young women in an alternativeschool for pregnant teens, we can imagine many other labels routinely found inschools that mark and displace the children they represent, including labels such asat risk, BD [behavior disordered, referring to students with behavioral disorders],and fag. Labeling is a form of objectification, a process of dehumanization thatyieldsdomination,oppression, andexploitation.Todisrupt thatprocessonemust re-discover, reclaim,andreassertone’s subjectivity—one’sagencyandvoice.AsPaulo

Freire (2000) wrote, “To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it” (88). Dis-covering our authentic, thoughtful, active selves should be the primary educationalproject, but many schooling practices, including labeling, work against that aim.

Luttrell invites her audience “inside one such label—pregnant teenagers—toget up close and examine what it is like to live inside it so that the dynamic interre-lationships of inequality, social distinction, and personal meanings can be madeclear” (Luttrell 2003, xv).

The text is organized in three parts. Luttrell establishes the physical and discur-sive context of the PPPT girls in Part 1, “Sexuality, Pregnancy, and Schooling.” Shedescribes the PPPT girls and provides some history of the educational fate of preg-nant youth before and after Title IX. Next, she unpacks the discourse that sur-rounds and shapes pregnant teenagers. Most fundamentally, this discourse reducesthem to simply “a problem,” but there are a variety of more nuanced stigmatizingframes, such as socially deviant ‘wrong girl,’ bad girl, and welfare cheat.

The second part, “Pregnant with Meaning,” is utterly true to its word. Simplypaging through, one will notice the first indication that this is a highly innovativeethnographic project: the collection of the girls’ self-portraits, in the style of TheVery Hungry Caterpillar (Carle 1994), reproduced in full color. Then, readingmore carefully, one finds that Luttrell used the activity, along with performances,narratives, and collages, as vehicles for the girls to construct and reflect on theirpregnancy, selfhood, identity, and agency. Her manner of engaging the girls is sig-nificant, both substantively and methodologically.

In terms of content, “Pregnant with Meaning” addresses “the (oftentimes pain-ful) gap between how the girls saw themselves and how they thought they wereseen by others” (Luttrell 2003, 139). Much of this seeing focuses on “social rela-tions of respect that shape the self- and identity-making process” (90), which forpregnant teens is especially conflict ridden. If one reads Pregnant Bodies with anexpectation of learning more about the PPPT program, the classrooms, the staff,and interactions that take place between adults and young people, disappointmentwill follow. Instead, it is truly an ethnographic portrait of the PPPT girls them-selves. Of PPPT we know little more than that it was the site of meaning- making.Luttrell adheres strictly to her focus on “the cultural and personal meanings aboutpregnancy” (xii) as the girls experience and construct them. The ethnography con-stitutes an extended journey into these young women’s subjectivities as they areconstrued through body image, self-concept, and social position. As such, the textthoroughly reframes the PPPT girls from being simply a problem (as society andthe program tend to regard their pregnant selves) to much more complex and dy-namic human subjects grappling with deep and contested transformations of self,both physical and psychosocial.

Two themes stand out as compelling reflections of these tensions. First, Luttrellfinds the PPPT girls answering “questions not their own.” The theme emerges witha “Who am I?” media collage project: Unlike the self-portraits, which were unique

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and highly variable, their collages and accompanying conversations were morestylized, reflecting shared social worlds such as consumerism, motherhood, andromance. The girls enter or anticipate such worlds already aware of the discoursesthat structure them, in ways that both command and diminish the girls. “Typically,at least one girl would express difficulty or frustration about not finding herselfrepresented in the magazines” (Luttrell 2003, 75). In the roles of consumer,mother, and romantic/sexual partner, the girls are aware of the choices they“ought” to make, whether those choices are feasible and regardless of any girl’sparticular desire. Even though she doesn’t find herself represented as she under-stands herself, each girl nevertheless sifts through images and text and crafts a re-sponse to “Who am I?” As Luttrell concludes, the collage “beckons us to recognize[the girl’s] creative agency in answering to her world, especially answering ques-tions that may not be her own, about love, sexuality, racial identification, andmotherhood” (111).

“Body-smarts” is the second major theme Luttrell surfaces from the PPPT girls’activities and interactions. Body-smarts captures the new dimensions of awarenesstriggered by their pregnant bodies. Their bodies draw growing judgment and dis-approval, which smarts. At the same time, this scrutiny stimulates their sense ofpossibility, their will to resist and talk back to this hurtful gaze: “They becomemore aware (they become smart) about their power and possibilities as women”(Luttrell 2003, 59). As such, body-smarts is dually coded as grief and wisdom.

The girls’body-smarts constitute a key site of educational opportunity. If “ques-tions not their own” alert us to the discourses these young women must learn tonavigate, their body-smarts become their primary tool. Left to their own devices,as pregnant teens most certainly and most youth typically so often are, they maylearn to use their body-smarts to their advantage. Surely, however, adults wield sig-nificant power in this matter. Luttrell cautions that we are “perpetrators of pain”when we engage dominant assumptions about types and labels. Alternatively, wecan be sources of wisdom who both resist and challenge such discourses and workwith young people to “make and revise themselves in their own images rather thanturning their self-definitions over to others” (144).

Substantively, Pregnant Bodies provides significant insight into the conflictsthe PPPT girls must negotiate, which is itself a major contribution to educationaldiscourse. Methodologically, too, Luttrell makes a noteworthy contribution to thepractice of educational study, discussion of which she shares in Part 3, “Notes toand From the Field.” In this section, she addresses a variety of interrelated issueswith the politics of representation, such as negotiating relationships in the field,writing against dominant myths, and the challenge for writing to affect change inpractice. Along with her innovative means of engaging the young women, theseconsiderations signal a work at the forefront of ethnographic practice.

Lincoln and Denzin (2000) argued that qualitative inquiry is positioned be-tween the sixth moment, characterized by the triple crisis of representation, legiti-

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mization, and praxis, and the seventh moment, where our concerns turn to the“moral discourse [and] sacred textualities” (3). It is, they wrote, apostexperimental moment, in that claims for objectivity fade in favor of inquirythat asks “how power is exercised in concrete human relations” (17) as it “con-nect(s) writings to the needs of a free, democratic society” (Denzin and Lincoln2000, 17). Pregnant Bodies is certainly situated in this context. Consider the fol-lowing passage:

To be responsible to the girls, myself, and to my audience means not simply de-

bunking myths and stereotypes about pregnant teens, but building alternative

visions …. The girls’self-representations … provide such an alternative vision.

And it would seem that it is my responsibility to offer a framework of interpreta-

tion and action, understood not as yet another “fixed” truth, but as a means for

understanding and facilitating the process of becoming and being made

(Luttrell 2003, 170, italics added)

In this description of her research, Luttrell helps us to imagine what the seventhmoment looks like in action.

Some might identify Luttrell’s work as postcritical ethnography, an interpretiveand reflexive form of inquiry regarding power relations, “enacted or produced asmoral activity” (Noblit 1999, 200). Luttrell herself identifies the project as a “so-cial art form,” “‘activist’ ethnography that … enables researchers and those whoare the subjects of research to change how they see themselves and are seen by oth-ers” (147). Postcritical and activist forms of ethnography coincide with Denzinand Lincoln’s argument for the seventh moment, where lives are sacred textualitiesand research is seen as a moral encounter.

In developing the moral encounter, we see Luttrell approaching the girlsthrough playful avenues of communication, which have the direct effect of gener-ating artifacts and performances that both communicate the girls’ perspectives andserve as grist for their mutual reflection and meaning-making. Throughout her in-terpretation of their conversations, the primary means of eliciting the girls’percep-tions, Luttrell is careful to let the girls speak for themselves (although often to“questions not their own”), honoring their standpoint and the views that follow. Itis in this fashion that she opens their worlds to herself and her readers. Luttrell isexplicitly mindful of her own position in the project and the power that goes alongwith it. Such reflexivity is consistent with the postcritical turn in ethnography.

Luttrell concludes Pregnant Bodies by integrating the moral and sacred in herfinal chapter, “Split at the Root: Rethinking Educational Practice.” Here she ad-dresses educators, drawing particular attention to “the pathology of educational in-stitutions” that “pit two ways of knowing against each other—objectivity and evi-dence against emotional understanding and artful engagement” (172). Thesplitting of selves that is the consequence of this pathology affects educators as

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well as students, and, drawing on contemporary insights from psychoanalysis,Luttrell argues that this creates an anxiety-ridden environment to the detriment ofmore fulfilling educational experiences.

Luttrell offers an alternative vision, which corresponds closely to the fieldworkshe constructed with the PPPT girls: “One of the most important educational inter-ventions that adults could offer pregnant girls is encouragement to develop andhold more complete images of themselves and their soon-to-be-born babies”(143). We learn of many forms of splitting of selves that the PPPT girls experience.Much of the splitting results from competing social roles and discursive construc-tions of partial selves, especially through labeling. This brings the matter to a pointwhere we can generalize Luttrell’s argument to many different student populationswho are vulnerable to diminishing discourses and practices—education, in part,should be about developing and maintaining more complete images of selves, in-cluding attention to their bodies and their emotions. We can pursue this by adapt-ing Luttrell’s ethnographic method which she describes as “an exercise in abidingcuriosity, careful listening, painstaking observation, sustained attention, emotionalengagement, missed opportunities, and the search for self-knowledge” (147). In sodoing, we would respond to her call to provide “young people more opportunitiesfor ‘play’—a protected space of moral and creative reflection that is increasingly atrisk of disappearing in our contemporary culture and education” (xviii).

References

Carle, E. 1994. The very hungry caterpillar. London: Hamish Hamilton.Denzin, N., and Y. Lincoln. 2000. “Introduction: The Discipline and Practice of Qualitative

Research.” In Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd ed., edited by N. Denzin and Y.Lincoln, 1–28. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Freire, P. 2000. Pedagogy of the oppressed, 30th anniversary edition. New York: Contin-uum.

Lincon, Y., and N. Denzin. 2000. “The Seventh Moment: Out of the Past.” In Handbook ofQualitative Research, 2nd ed., edited by N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln, 1047–1065. Thou-sand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Noblit, G. 1999. Particularities: Collected essays on ethnography and education. NewYork: Peter Lang.

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