Puberty Poetics is an ongoing research project that finds a home in the blog pubertypoetics.net. It is intended to serve as a platform for critical discourse around the fields of puberty, adolescence and childhood.

A lot has been said about young people in the academic fields of education science, puberty science and psychology, as well as in advice literature for parents, in teacher’s rooms and medical practices. The reason for the hormonal processes in young people’s bodies that serve as the base for puberty as a social project remain largely unexplored. Nevertheless, the aforementioned fields generate a set of normativities and practices that intervene in these specific bodies and minds. Puberty became not a question of if, why and how, but a question of where and when, normally.

In the form of Poetics, as writing about writing, as a practice that fuses aesthetics and politics, I am exploring what effects puberty has on how we think temporality. Drawing on a western literary history that features adolescence as one of its favorite subjects, I am asking myself and collaborators who is left out of the dominant narratives of puberty and how second puberties and other queer ways of looking at temporality could benefit the young and the old alike.

I work as a writer and researcher based in Amsterdam. In 2020, I graduated from the German Literature Institute in Leipzig with a novel that explores Vampirism against the backdrop of contemporary queer politics, historical pharmaceutical and medicinal discourse, authorship and text production.

Currently I am a postgraduate at Sandberg Instituut’s Critical Studies programme. Next to my writing projects I do the web design for pubertypoetics.net and other websites. If you are interested in my work or in contributing to the blog project, send me an email: jasper.westhaus@sandberg.nl.

*1996 in Hannover, Germany. I go by they/them pronouns.