Sara I. Magalhães

Discursos de jovens adolescentes portugueses sobre sexualidade e amor: implicações para a educação sexual

The efforts to lower adolescents sexual risk behaviors have led to results that did not come up to the expectations. Lack of knowledge on myths and beliefs on sexuality may be the main cause of this failure. Trying to overcome some of the limitations of previous studies, this work aimed to directly hear adolescents trying to understand, in a more spontaneous and deeply way, the perceptions and beliefs associated with love and sexual relations. To do so, the discourses of adolescents during a sexual education program were collected and analyzed through Foucauldian Discourse Analysis. Results point out the recognition of sexual double standard, although there seem to exist a tendency to consider a single sex standard and disregard the importance of prevention behaviors. We conclude with some clues about sexual education.

VII. Our place in history: Young feminists at the margins

Feminisms in Portugal, as elsewhere, have been shaped historically. From the revolutions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which ended monarchy and established a republican system, women have taken a stand. In the late 1970s, after 48 years of dictatorship during which feminist issues were effectively silenced, feminist groups began to appear in Portugal. It was then, in 1976, that UMAR (Uniao de Mulheres Alternativa e Resposta [‘Union of Women for Alternatives and Answers’]) began its fight against discrimination and violence against women. While the issues that UMAR addressed were relevant throughout the country, their initiatives did not always reach all of the regions of Portugal. In 2008, with the intention of overcoming this deficiency, as well as engaging with contemporary debates on feminism, we joined a group of young women to create an UMAR regional core in Braga, in the north of Portugal. In a clearly conservative region, our group stood out; creating unique dynamics that nevertheless echoed with the historical memory of earlier feminists. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to