What to do with teenage sexuality? The anthropology of forms of government in Brazil

Abstract

This article discusses how the Brazilian Ministry for Women, the Family and Human Rights operates in relation to the prevention of so-called “teenage pregnancy”, analysing the Ministry’s political strategies, directives, initiatives for conversation with society-at-large, and campaigns for engaging their target public. We find, at the interstices of state bureaucracy, peculiar ways of dealing with and erasing teenage sexuality and gender markers that bear on teenage socialization, both of which are constitutive dimensions of these subjects, in favour of an idyllic family ethos which is contrasted to the sociocultural, material and symbolic dimensions that weave relations between generations within the domestic sphere. Childhood and self-care become central to government rhetoric, mobilizing conservative strategies that stem from an alarmist outlook which remains restricted to the private domain, singling out the (cis)heteronormative family – rather than schools – as the locus for sexuality education.