SEXUAL EDUCATION AND THE SCHOOL: PERSPECTIVES AND SEXUAL PROTOCOLS OF YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN

This paper discusses the need to re-contextualize the issue of youth sexuality in regards to citizenship and with the sexual education of young men and young women in contemporary Portuguese schools. It is set in the light of a theory that builds on the relation between gender power and the new policies on sexuality. This study comes as a result of the analysis of some interviews from the project “Sexuality, Youth and Teenage Pregnancy in Northeast Portugal”, whose analysis is focused here in two axis: the first discusses what we refer to as learning protocols of sexuality. These are developed in the realm of the emotional and sexual relationships which are lived and narrated by young people, and where expressions of sexuality may be subjected to mechanisms of subordination to gender relationships of power and of social and sexual hegemonic contract. The second axis focuses and analyses the experiences of sexual education in school, of the same teenagers. It discusses some limitations and constraints of youth sexual education, in the light of an enlarged conception of sexual and intimate citizenship and of the principles that guide it.