Jeunes de banlieues. Construction identitaire, représentations de la sexualité et comportements sexuels a risque

The suburbs of Paris are shared between towns and neighbourhoods with different socialcharacteristics, defining personal behaviours and social representations at the most intimatespheres like sexuality. From the observation of student’s populations, we try in this paper toevaluate the importance of social condition and school contexts over sexual behaviour andrepresentations, as well as their knowledge, beliefs, attitudes and practices regarding HIV infection.My purpose was to understand the configurations and layouts of the representations andbehaviours by taking into account the scholar, social and cultural contexts of the subjects.The sexual representations and experiences of individuals are too marked by the gender they belongto, which induces social roles and differentiated ideals and determines behaviours, namely thosethat concern the body and sexuality. The speeches of young people questioned in an ethnologicalinvestigation on sexual representations and existences in the Eastern suburb of Paris, denounce theopposition between feminine and masculine values, and show the difference between therepresentations and behaviours of young males and females.