Between categories and experiences: repertoires of sexual naming and gender asymmetries among secondary school students

Abstract

This article examines how secondary school students name attraction and sexual identity in the context of expanded circulation of vocabularies concerning sexual and gender diversity. The research is based on a questionnaire administered in 2022 to 1,242 final-year students in eight public high schools located in areas of high social vulnerability in São Paulo, Santos, and Sorocaba within the FAPESP Thematic Project Young People’s Vulnerabilities to STIs/HIV and Intimate Partner Violence: Evaluation of Human Rights–Based Psychosocial Interventions (grant no. 2017/25950-2). The available cross-tabulations show that responses indicating attraction to more than one gender, as well as bisexual, pansexual, or uncertain sexual identifications, appear, in the population surveyed, considerably more often among people assigned female at birth than among those assigned male at birth. It is argued that this asymmetry does not warrant attributing homogeneous fluidity to youth, nor treating identities as transparent reflections of individual desires. Rather, it points to an unequal availability of repertoires for interpreting and communicating experiences of sexuality. Categories such as “bisexual”, “pansexual” and “not sure” are understood as situated resources for naming, articulated with gender relations, circuits of recognition, and the historical conditions under which these languages circulate.