The paper analyzes the way young people learn and confront sexualities in Portuguese urban and rural schools. More concretely, it focuses the importance of sex education on sexualities and gender production, framed by educational concerns and intimate citizenship. It attempts to develop a critical and gender approach on young’s people discourses, in the sociological and educational fields. With centralized guidelines for sex education, it could be assumed that there are universal and homogeneous learning experiences confronting pupils in schools. Probably hearing the voices of students will clarify whether there is diversity among them. Similar researches have been carried out in other European countries, namely in England (Measor 2000; Kehily 2002; Paetcher  2007; Allen 2008; Trimble 2009) privileging young people voices to rethink sexual education; in Brazil (Heilborn et al, 2006; Louro 2001), Austrália and USA (Epstein et al 2004; Keddie 2009; Fine 2009) focusing the official silence about sexualities in schools and universities.

To support this framework, Michele Fine’s (2006; 2009) typology about prevailing discourses of the way sexuality is managed inside schools is a central contribution. Four young sexualities ideal types are presented: sexuality as violence; sexuality as victimization; sexuality as individual morality and sexuality as desire. It is considered that school is under a sexual and gender regime, where girls (and also many boys) are educated and positioned as victims of male desire, of coercion and of moral judgments. Fine (2009) argues that hegemonic discourses and practices are an obstacle to the development of a critical approach, namely for girls, for whom equality can only be considered in more systematic way if school education acknowledge “sexuality as desire”. Therefore, the aim here is to explore and reformulate this typology, through listening to youth heterogeneity, proposing new dimensions of sexualities – sexualities as a silent pact, sexualities as “girl power” and sexualities as citizenship practice.

This interpretation is structured around a perspective of seeing “pupils’ body” as an “educated body” (Louro, 1999) that is punished, encouraged or silenced in “curriculum of the body” (Gordon et al., 2000). Under public and political pressure, schools, and especially sex education, emerge as “spaces of negotiation” confronting policies and moral interests that regulate young people desires and support social institutions, as heterosexuality and marriage. Thus, to perceive schools as powerful places of sexuality learning, free of “discourse of victimization” imply the compromise of educational institutions with sexual and intimate citizenshiporientations (Richardson & Turner, 2001; Plummer, 2003).

Hence, to understand this argument focused on young people sexuality learning processes at school, it is necessary to relate their discourses and experiences to wider social controversies going beyond school and sex education courses in a wider European and global contexts. Therefore, young students’ discourses are seen as “communities of interpretation” of sexualities (Kehily & Nayak, 2009), through negotiation between social representations (from media, civil society, religion, family and peers) and local-global consumption.

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