Sexuality, a (secondary) right? Intersections on sexuality, education and punishment

Abstract

This paper is part of a research on sexuality and youth held from March 2015 to October 2016, in three Juvenile Detention Centers in Rio de Janeiro, two male and the only female in the state. From the methodological perspective of cartography, during these months we followed several processes in the centers, interviewing youngsters and professionals from different segments of the institution. We present here reflections on the debates that we raised in the field regarding sexuality in the juvenile justice system, seeking to encompass the experiences and perceptions of the youngsters, the agents, the technical staff, the professors and the direction, articulating the devices of gender, social class, generation and race to think about the productions of technologies and mechanisms of control and in the punitive logic that seems to govern the institutional daily life. Bearing in mind the tensions that move (or crystallize) debates about sexuality in these contexts, we propose some reflections on how sexuality is also the target of these punitive and containment policies, since it is classified, hierarchized, monitored and limited in these spaces.