Da reconstrução dos valores às práticas de relações sexuais em locais públicos entre adolescentes na cidade de Maputo

Abstract

The public space is characterized by its openness and universality, and may be used by different categories of people to carry out a variety of activities, including sexual relations, the focus of this work. We seek to understand the motivations that lead adolescents to use public spaces for sexual relations. This research is based on approach that defends change in values, as a phenomenon that is occurring in adolescence in the field of power relations between generations regarding adolescents’ sexual surveillance. Both sexual surveillance and the microphysics of power conceived by Michel Foucault constitute our theoretical body, from which we understand that having sexual relations in public places is embedded in one’s sexual orientation, which, in turn, is inserted in the expansion of power exerted by social institutions on adolescents. The qualitative approach used allowed to capture, from the perspective of the adolescents interviewed data showing that both the school and the family are institutions that seek to monitor adolescents’ sexual life, on the one hand, and that adolescents interpret and reconstruct in their friendship groups the values learned in those social institutions, on the basis of which they define their sexuality, on the other hand. The study concludes stressing that the use of public spaces by adolescents for sexual relations is associated with a set of prohibitions imposed on them at the family level, as well as with the claim for autonomy in defining their sexual orientation.