"This book presents an ethnography of LGBT activism in São Paulo, Brazil's largest city, during a decade (2008-2018) when Brazilian politics experienced a strong right-wing turn and increased partisanship. LGBT movements responded to increased right-wing opposition to sexual and gender autonomy in a variety of ways and Sosa analyzes this transforming political culture by examining debates over LGBT rights that extended across Brazilian political and public life--street protests, court cases, legislative campaigns, news coverage of violent crime, and television melodrama. That these debates play out in public allows the author to apply the lens of aesthetics, "examining what attracts us or repels us from political rights." The book begins with a discussion of how sexuality has moved from the private sphere to the political one as it came to be seen (by some) as a fundamental human right. The rest of the book unfolds chronologically. Chapter one traces the history of LGBT activism in Brazil, especially the push for anti-discrimination laws, and the debates about how to define homophobia. Chapter two introduces São Paulo's LGBT movement, and how over the decade preceding the period of study here, activists rethought what rights-based politics looked like via the kinds of actions they were able to perform. On a theoretical level, this chapter is exploring "activist subjectivity through the aesthetic category of judgment--or how individuals enter shared alignment through statements of perception." Chapter three revolves around the city's Pride parade, the largest in the world, and how that hyper visibility works in relation to everyday, less-spectacular forms of visibility. Brazil has a robust tradition of street protests, and chapter four looks at the intertwined aesthetics of queer politics and public protest via an ethnography with university students. The last chapter builds on these discussions as São Paulo, a center of LGBT activism and public visibility, also emerges as the center of a white, middle class rejection of the left-leaning governments that support sexual autonomy. The author suggests that the "debates" central to sexual politics actually engender, rather than reflect, two "pre-established sides to a public issue." A conclusion suggests that rights-based political paradigms are increasingly problematic for both the left and the right, as seen in the sex wars described in this book"--

In this history of right-wing politics in Brazil during the Cold War, Benjamin Cowan puts the spotlight on the Cold Warriors themselves. Drawing on little-tapped archival records, he shows that by midcentury, conservatives--individuals and organizations, civilian as well as military--were firmly situated in a transnational network of right-wing cultural activists. They subsequently joined the powerful hardline constituency supporting Brazil's brutal military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. There, they lent their weight to a dictatorship that, Cowan argues, operationalized a moral panic that conflated communist subversion with manifestations of modernity, coalescing around the crucial nodes of gender and sexuality, particularly in relation to youth, women, and the mass media. The confluence of an empowered right and a security establishment suffused with rightist moralism created strongholds of anticommunism that spanned government agencies, spurred repression, and generated attempts to control and even change quotidian behavior. Tracking how limits to Cold War authoritarianism finally emerged, Cowan concludes that the record of autocracy and repression in Brazil is part of a larger story of reaction against perceived threats to traditional views of family, gender, moral standards, and sexuality--a story that continues in today's culture wars.

Examines debates over sexual honor to explore the ways in which private morality was infused with the cultural politics of nation-building and modernization, and was used to legitimate power differentials based on race, gender, and class.

"Reexamining feminist sexual politics since the 1970s-the rivalries and the remarkable alliances"--

In Violence and Desire in Brazilian Lesbian Relationships, Allen examines the lives of Brazilian women in same-sex relationships. This examination contributes to interdisciplinary discussions of female same-sex sexuality, violence, race, and citizenship. Using fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, primarily with Afro-Brazilian women in the city of Salvador da Bahia, Allen argues that Brazilian lesbian women reject Brazilian cultural norms that encourage male domination and female submission through their engagement in romantic relationships with each other. At the same time Allen claims lesbian women also reproduce Brazilian cultural ideals that associate passion, intensity, and power with physical dominance through their engagement in infidelity and intimate partner violence. The book demonstrates that lesbian women are nonetheless marginalized as Brazilian citizens through widespread social and political invisibility despite these apparent displays of masculinized power.

Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil is a groundbreaking comparative analysis of the historical development and contemporary dynamics of LGBT activism in Latin America’s two largest democracies. Rafael de la Dehesa focuses on the ways that LGBT activists have engaged with the state, particularly in alliance with political parties and through government health agencies in the wake of the AIDS crisis. He examines this engagement against the backdrop of the broader political transitions to democracy, the neoliberal transformation of state–civil society relations, and the gradual consolidation of sexual rights at the international level. His comparison highlights similarities between sexual rights movements in Mexico and Brazil, including a convergence on legislative priorities such as antidiscrimination laws and the legal recognition of same-sex couples. At the same time, de la Dehesa points to notable differences in the tactics deployed by activists and the coalitions brought to bear on the state. De la Dehesa studied the archives of activists, social-movement organizations, political parties, religious institutions, legislatures, and state agencies, and he interviewed hundreds of individuals, not only LGBT activists, but also feminists, AIDS and human-rights activists, party militants, journalists, academics, and state officials. He marshals his prodigious research to reveal the interplay between evolving representative institutions and LGBT activists’ entry into the political public sphere in Latin America, offering a critical analysis of the possibilities opened by emerging democratic arrangements, as well as their limitations. At the same time, exploring activists’ engagement with the international arena, he offers new insights into the diffusion and expression of transnational norms inscribing sexual rights within a broader project of liberal modernity. Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil is a landmark examination of LGBT political mobilization.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of women become victims of sexual violence in conflict zones around the world; in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone, approximately 1,100 rapes are reported each month. This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the causes, consequences and responses to sexual violence in contemporary armed conflict. It explores the function and effect of wartime sexual violence and examines the conditions that make women and girls most vulnerable to these acts both before, during and after conflict. To understand the motivations of the men (and occasionally women) who perpetrate this violence, the book analyzes the role played by systemic and situational factors such as patriarchy and militarized masculinity. Difficult questions of accountability are tackled; in particular, the case of child soldiers, who often suffer a double victimization when forced to commit sexual atrocities. The book concludes by looking at strategies of prevention and protection as well as new programs being set up on the ground to support the rehabilitation of survivors and their communities. Sexual violence in war has long been a taboo subject but, as this book shows, new and courageous steps are at last being taken Ð at both local and international level - to end what has been called the “greatest silence in history”.