Securing Sex

On April 17, 2016, the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies voted to impeach President Dilma Rousseff. As the deputies cast their votes, they gave short proclamations to justify their decision, dedicating their votes not only to their state, voters, and family but also to God. Others offered their votes on behalf of a variety of conservative causes célèbres, like schoolchildren whose sexuality might become muddled by Rousseff's party's supposed promotion of the concept that gender is a social construct. It seemed that a new right-wing era had arrived, taking advantage of Brazilians' conservative views on morality and sex. But was it a new era? As Benjamin A. Cowan's Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil convincingly demonstrates, moral panic and anxieties about sex and gender were key, but often forgotten, hallmarks of another period of right-wing ascendancy in Brazil: the 1964–85 military dictatorship, which began, like Rousseff's impeachment, with right-wing unease with a leftist president who might threaten the country's political, economic, and moral order.The central argument of Securing Sex is that Brazil's “Cold Warrior” intellectuals, politicians, military officers, and members of security agencies equated midcentury challenges to gender norms and sexual mores, particularly among youth, with communist subversion. At first glance, this is a surprising assertion; scholars have long emphasized a preoccupation with “Western Christian” civilization among Argentina's 1976–83 Proceso de Reorganización Nacional, not Brazil's regime. Yet Cowan offers overwhelming evidence that defending the country against moral crisis was a key part of the Brazilian regime's agenda, particularly among its more radically conservative elements. He does so by consulting a vast array of sources, including transnational right-wing books and pamphlets, 35 newspapers, and oral history interviews with right-wing military men. Most impressively, unlike other scholars, who have used the recently declassified records of the Brazilian security apparatus to study those who attracted the regime's repressive gaze, Cowan uses these sources to paint a more nuanced picture of the regime itself. Throughout, although he clearly disagrees with its right-wing ideology himself and often finds it comical (as many readers will), he treats it appropriately seriously, as an ideological and political option that made sense to those who put it into practice—with often deadly consequences.The book is divided into seven chapters. Chapters 1–3 situate Brazil's right-wing Cold War ideology within broader contexts of twentieth-century elite longings for an idealized past, the forces unleashed by counterculture and the sexual revolution, and transnational conservative thinkers and activists. Chapters 4–6 then turn to how the most radical factions of the dictatorship attempted to put this right-wing moral ideology into practice. In chapter 4, Cowan focuses on how these discourses were doctrinalized by a “moral technocracy” of security planners in the prestigious Escola Superior de Guerra (ESG). Chapter 5 examines the ways in which the security establishment, intelligence officers, and police implemented right-wing moral doctrine as they battled linked threats (in their minds, at least) of youthful deviance and leftist subversion. Yet moral panic surrounding sex and subversion was not limited to ESG seminars or the regime's security services; chapter 6 shows how right-wing ideology was transmitted to the next generation through mandatory “moral and civic education” courses. Finally, chapter 7 traces the process by which the conflation of morality and national security went from a central concern of the military regime in the early 1970s to a peripheral position that left its remaining adherents discouraged and resentful. Cowan concludes with a reflection on the fate of anticommunist, conservative moral panic in Brazil's New Republic. As he cites modern defenders of the military regime who still rail against communism and immorality (today equated with homosexuality), one cannot help but think of the sharp rightward turn that Brazilian politics have taken since Cowan finished his manuscript.Cowan's argument that concerns about morality, gender, and youth were paramount for many of the regime's most enthusiastic supporters is highly convincing. In particular, he shows that these concerns were largely directed at the mostly white and middle-class youth who participated in 1960s counterculture. It would be fascinating to know more about the extent to which these same concerns were directed at working-class, African-descended teenagers and young adults, whose capacity for sexual self-control has always been doubted by Brazilian elites.Cowan's monograph is one of the best recent works on Brazil's military dictatorship. Meticulously researched, convincingly argued, beautifully written, about a topic that is fascinating, understudied, and remarkably applicable to today's political context, Securing Sex will be of interest not only to undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars interested in Cold War Latin America but also to people beyond the academy eager to understand the moral ideology that underlies right-wing politics in much of the contemporary West, including the United States

Communism · Left-wing politics · Morality · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subversion · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Law · Politics and Society in Latin America

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