ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the dilemmatic natural-unnatural pubescent body often appeared as inhabited by a naturally abnormal sexual self. It draws on the discursive and technical apparatus underpinning the clinical production and subjectivation of these two personas. The chapter shows how the disparate regimes of behavioural abnormality and biological monstrosity co-constructed pubertal precocity as a clinical condition furnished with the positivity of measurements. It discusses how the assessments of the reproductive child, the little masturbator, and the ‘modest’ young girl may be seen as an anticipatory or primordial event in the emergence of a clinical practice concerned with standards of pubertal maturation. To sum up, the problematic of sexual drives in early cases of precocious puberty produced two distinctive figures: briefly, the masturbating young boy and the ‘modest’ young girl. The completely different games of truth sustaining these figures, and their specific articulations with the problematic of sexual precocity, were organised around the power-knowledge rationality of an instinctual pubertal subject.
