The “carrete” as scenario: an ethnographic approach to youth sexuality in occasional spaces and contexts

Abstract

The experience of sexuality in youth cultures own spaces of amusement, is a phenomenon that has been considered only few times at the moment of constructing preventive policy directed to the youngsters in Chile. It’s in the youth cultures own stages –associated with their spaces of leisure and particularly, the carrete–where urban youngsters, men and women, experiment and perform different approaches to sexuality. On the other hand, it’s in the carrete experience and its relation with occasional sexuality where body issues arise in youth cultures, which refuses to be regulated from a preventive norm that wont consider its own temporalities and codes. 

This article exposes the results of an ethnographic research on youth cultures sexuality in four regions of Chile, which by approaching the carrete scenario, aims to reach a new point of view for preventive policies which -through a harm reduction perspective- can help to obtain a better knowledge and comprehension of the contexts and situations in which young people exercise and develop their sexuality.