Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil

*Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil*
Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil
	Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil
Autor(es)	Benjamin A. Cowan
Idioma	Inglês
País	Estados Unidos
Assunto	Anticomunismo e repressão sexual durante a Ditadura militar no Brasil
Gênero	Não-ficção
Linha temporal	2016
Editora	University of North Carolina Press
Lançamento	2016
ISBN	978-1-4696-2750-2

Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil é um livro de Benjamin A. Cowan, publicado pela editora da Universidade da Carolina do Norte em 2016.^[1]

Apresentação de Benjamin Cowan na Comissão Nacional da Verdade (2013)

Depois de muitas publicações que denunciaram os abusos de direitos humanos praticados pela ditadura militar, mas influenciado pela Comissão Nacional da Verdade, Cowan descreve as atitudes das forças conservadoras, expressas pela extrema-direita ativista, que influenciaram o governo do Brasil durante a ditadura militar. No contexto da Guerra Fria e sob a influência do catolicismo e da eugenia, diversas instituições participaram de uma rede transnacional que influenciou as atitudes e leis repressivas dos governos ditatoriais na América Latina nas décadas de 60 a 80. O livro discute o anticomunismo como um tipo de pânico moral que criou uma conspiração de vilões comunistas apresentados como homossexuais depravados, libertinos promíscuos e usuários de drogas responsáveis pela luta armada.^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5]

Securing Sex foi extremamente bem recebido pelos acadêmicos brasilianistas, que o consideraram um divisor de águas nos estudos sobre a história do tempo presente relacionados à ditadura brasileira. Os comentários destacaram a abordagem de Cowan no uso de fontes que apresentam as perspectivas da direita e o equilíbrio do livro no uso dessas fontes associadas aos relatos da imprensa da época para compor um novo entendimento da ditadura e suas contradições internas.^[6]

Sinopse

O livro é derivado da tese de doutorado em história defendida em 2010 por Cowan na Universidade da Califórnia em Los Angeles.^[7] Explora a repressão que ocorreu em meados da Guerra Fria no Brasil e em outros locais da América Latina, abordando o assunto pelas vozes e atitudes da direita ativista, baseado em registros de arquivos ainda não utilizados pelos historiadores. Ele descreve como essa direita ativista usou a ditadura militar no Brasil para propagar a ideia de uma população "modesta" e "moralmente correta", apresentando ainda as atitudes da direita e as leis que foram criadas sob sua influência.^[1]^{[nota 2]}

Recepção

O brasilianista James Green, da Universidade Brown, fez uma resenha elogiosa de Securing Sex no Journal of Social History [en]. Green considerou que o livro abrirá uma nova perspectiva nos estudos sobre a história do tempo presente relacionados à ditadura militar brasileira.^[2]

No Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Bryan McCann começa sua análise afirmando que o trabalho de Cowan é uma "importante contribuição para a nossa compreensão da ditadura militar Brasileira de 1964 a 1985", baseada em uma metodologia sólida.^[3]

Gregory Mitchell, como Bryan Pitts,^[8] relaciona o pânico moral dos anos de chumbo à ascensão das bancadas da bíblia, do boi e da bala, coletivamente denominadas bancada BBB, que participaram ativamente do impeachment de Dilma Rousseff.^[9]

Belisário Penna foi um eugenista pioneiro do pânico moral da direita brasileira^{[nota 3]}

Plínio Salgado, da Ação Integralista Brasileira^{[nota 4]}

Prêmios

Securing Sex ganhou o prêmio de melhor livro de 2017 da seção brasileira da Latin American Studies Association [en].^[10]

Ver também

Notas

↑ p. 27 Nationally famed as a writer, politician, and sometime president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, Gustavo Barroso represented Brazil’s most extreme, fascist-inspired anti-Semitism. His praise for Mussolini and denunciations of Jews revolved, however, around the very moral panic with which he and other rightists seminally contemplated communist revolutionary warfare: the sinful “excesses” of modern sexuality and gender, and their effects on young people. Jews, communists, and liberals merged in his reproofs of “prostitution,” “homosexuality,” and working women.
↑ p. 49 Spurred by Vargas- era defeats or not, the 1960s Right replicated the complaints of its 1930s predecessors with remarkable thematic precision, decrying contemporary media, pathologized sexual and gender deviance, women’s public roles, and the loss of the medieval socioreligious order as communist machinations and, hence, national security concerns.
↑ p. 25. Penna decried modern “moral anarchy” and traced it to the Right’s two great political bugbears: global liberalism and communism. Penna insisted that communists’ primary offensive lay in promoting hygienic, eugenic, and moral “degeneracy.” “Subversive currents” of Marxism and liberalism, he claimed, would attempt to immolate the country in the flames of degenerative “moral weakening.” Setting a long-term tone for anticommunist pseudoscience, Penna concluded that youth and women lay at the center of this subversive-degenerative plot, as—once abandoned by their gender-deviant, working mothers— “ children are the preferred victims,” among whom “syphilis and venereal maladies produce great devastation; prostitution gathers its victims before they reach puberty; in them alcoholism, dementia, and crime find refuge.” Here, in what would become a rightist tenet, modernity and communism (and the associated evil of liberalism) portended a sexually and gender deviant, degenerative onslaught of moral dissolution.
↑ p. 26 Typically, Salgado insisted that only proper moral and religious pedagogy could counteract moral and gender catastrophe, women’s abandonment of the home, and sexual deviance, re- prioritizing moral manhood and domestic womanhood in what Salgado called “the global launch of the New Man of the New Times” or the “reconstruction of Man.”
↑ p. 45 Alceu Amoroso Lima, in some ways a friend and supporter of the regime, criticized officials as “opportunists” bent on exploiting the church without advancing its moral agenda. His specifi c complaints surfaced in a letter to Capanema that demanded a better, state-led imbrication of anticommunism and moralism, as nationalist, conservative, and religious prerogatives. Blithely conflating anticommunism and moralism, Lima insisted that the Vargas state must “react fi rmly against the growing infiltration of communism in our midst”; that is, it must combat “communism . . . the epitome of all anti-spiritual and therefore anti-Catholic thinking” by “combating seriously the immorality of the cinemas and theaters with honest censorship.”
↑ p. 44 Accordingly, the Centro Dom Vital suggestions teemed with moral outrage about potential statism in pedagogy. The constitution of 1934, railed one critic, had allowed liberalism, socialism, bolshevism, and “Masonic Judaism” to “violate the natural rights of parents and the divine right of the Church” to inculcate morality. “The State,” he grumbled, “does not grant Morality.”
↑ p. 42 Capanema’s draft made no mention of catechism, and Minister of War Eurico Gaspar Dutra advised Capanema and Vargas against Catholic religious education in the program.
↑ p. 42 Filinto Müller, the fearsome chief of Vargas’s Federal Police and an erstwhile friend to Integralists (and Nazis), spearheaded the regime’s 1937 move to crush AIB. Müller used “the same tactics employed against the communists” to hound AIB members, and when rightist clergy opposed the disbanding of their fascist, moralist ally, Müller, at Vargas’s behest, moved to pressure these clerics into deferring to the regime. Despite his former closeness with the Integralists, Müller promoted the primacy of the state, looking with suspicion on cooperation between moralistic Integralists and the church.
↑ p. 41 In a letter to Vargas, Capanema wrote that the projected youth organization would “provide an education that prepares the type of man that the Estado Novo needs to guarantee its survival, prestige and usefulness.”

Referências

↑ ^a ^b Cowan, Benjamin A. (2016). Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil (em inglês). Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books. ISBN 9781469627519
↑ ^a ^b Green, James N. (2017). «Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil. By Benjamin A. Cowan» (requer pagamento). Journal of Social History (em inglês). doi:10.1093/jsh/shx045. The popular unrest of the early 1960s coincided with gradual shifts in sexual and social practices among sectors of the middle classes that positioned themselves against the new political order. Cowan convincingly shows us in a meticulous analysis of documents produced by the military regime and its defenders that the generals went far beyond pursuing communists and corruption, as they tried to purge the nation of its allegedly polluted past. According to his analysis, the new wielders of political power considered that gender disorder and sexual promiscuity among Brazil’s youth, especially the supposed increase in homosexuality, were eroding traditional Christian values, the family, and the state. This moral panic among the regime’s supporters permeated their understanding of modern Brazilian society’s woes and was a driving motivation in their efforts to re-moralize the nation, as manifested in the obligatory “moral and civics” courses required in all schools, to offer one obvious example.
↑ ^a ^b McCann, Bryan (2017). «Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil by Benjamin A. Cowan (review)». Journal of Interdisciplinary History (em inglês). 48 (1): 112–113. ISSN 1530-9169. But Cowan reveals a more prevalent sense on the right that the increasing prominence of premarital sex, homosexuality, birth control, marijuana use, and a host of other cultural transformations in Brazilian society were manifestations of communist conspiracy.
↑ Halperin, Paula (2018). «Benjamin Cowan, Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2016. Pp. 324. $85.00 cloth; $32.95 paper.» (requer pagamento). The Americas (em inglês). 75 (2): 436–438. ISSN 0003-1615. doi:10.1017/tam.2017.171. The documentation Cowan assesses is broadly impressive, even astounding, and includes interviews, military journals, surveillance and censorship reports, and police records. Cowan uses this well-rounded and meticulously pursued archive to cover important ground that takes us beyond established narratives in the historiography of the period.
↑ Dunn, Christopher (2019). «Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil - by Cowan, Benjamin A.». Bulletin of Latin American Research (em inglês). 38 (1): 109–111. ISSN 1470-9856. doi:10.1111/blar.12935
↑ Loureiro, Felipe P. (2017). «Securing sex: morality and repression in the making of Cold War Brazil». Cold War History (em inglês). 17 (3): 325–327. ISSN 1468-2745. doi:10.1080/14682745.2017.1341419
↑ Cowan, Benjamin Arthur (2010). «The Secret History of Subversion: Sex, Modernity, and the Brazilian National Security State» (Resumo. Obra completa requer pagamento) (em inglês). Universidade da Califórnia em Los Angeles. Consultado em 21 de agosto de 2018 – via ProQuest
↑ Pitts, Bryan (2018). «Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil». Hispanic American Historical Review (em inglês). 98 (2): 343–345. ISSN 0018-2168. doi:10.1215/00182168-4379753
↑ Mitchell, Gregory (2018). «Benjamin A. Cowan, Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Photographs, acronyms, notes, bibliography, index, 340 pp.; hardcover $85, paperback $32.95, ebook $24.99.» (requer pagamento). Latin American Politics and Society (em inglês). 60 (1): 176–179. ISSN 1531-426X. doi:10.1017/lap.2017.14. Anyone wanting to understand the recent rise and political entrenchment of the Brazilian right-wing Bancada BBB (Bíblia, Boi e Bala, or Bible, Beef, and Bullet Caucus) would do well to read (and heed) Benjamin A. Cowan’s book. Indeed, to read this book is to reckon with the legacies and logics of moral panic that would later resurface amid the more recent overthrow of President Dilma Rousseff by the BBB politicians now embroiled in their own criminal corruption scandals.
↑ «2017 Section Awards» (em inglês). Latin American Studies Association. Cópia arquivada em 3 de agosto de 2018

Leituras complementares

Buarque, Daniel (2019). «Direita usa moralismo como arma desde antes da ditadura, diz historiador». Blogo do Brasilianismo. Cópia arquivada em 4 de julho de 2019
Cowan, B. A. (2007). «Sex and the Security State: Gender, Sexuality, and "Subversion" at Brazil's Escola Superior de Guerra, 1964-1985». Journal of the History of Sexuality. 16 (3): 459–481. ISSN 1043-4070. JSTOR 30114193
Cowan, B. A. (2012). «"Why Hasn't This Teacher Been Shot?" Moral-Sexual Panic, the Repressive Right, and Brazil's National Security State». Hispanic American Historical Review. 92 (3): 403–436. ISSN 0018-2168. doi:10.1215/00182168-1600279
Cowan, B. A. (2014). «"A Passive Homosexual Element" Digitized Archives and the Policing of Homosex in Cold War Brazil». Radical History Review. 2014 (120): 183–203. ISSN 0163-6545. doi:10.1215/01636545-2703796
Cowan, Benjamin A. (2016). Only for the Cause of the Pátria: The Frustrations of Interwar Moralism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. doi:10.5149/northcarolina/9781469627502.003.0001. Resumo divulgativo
Cowan, B. A. (2016). «Holy Ghosts of Brazil's Past». NACLA Report on the Americas. 48 (4): 346–352. ISSN 1071-4839. doi:10.1080/10714839.2016.1258277
Cowan, Benjamin (2017). «Violências pornográficas: anticomunismo e 'permissividade' como armas de guerra». HuffPost. Cópia arquivada em 4 de julho de 2019
Ghirotto, Edoardo (2019). «O apelo moralista - AMARELAS.com: Benjamin Cowan». VEJA.com. Cópia arquivada em 22 de março de 2019
Cowan, B.A.; Thives, V. (2019). «Brazil and the transnational New Right – An interview with Benjamin Cowan» (em inglês). SciELO in Perspective: Humanities

[1] . 27 Nationally famed as a writer, politician, and sometime president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, Gustavo Barroso represented Brazil’s most extreme, fascist-inspired anti-Semitism. His praise for Mussolini and denunciations of Jews revolved, however, around the very moral panic with which he and other rightists seminally contemplated communist revolutionary warfare: the sinful “excesses” of modern sexuality and gender, and their effects on young people. Jews, communists, and liberals merged in his reproofs of “prostitution,” “homosexuality,” and working women.

[9] . 49 Spurred by Vargas- era defeats or not, the 1960s Right replicated the complaints of its 1930s predecessors with remarkable thematic precision, decrying contemporary media, pathologized sexual and gender deviance, women’s public roles, and the loss of the medieval socioreligious order as communist machinations and, hence, national security concerns.

[12] . 25. Penna decried modern “moral anarchy” and traced it to the Right’s two great political bugbears: global liberalism and communism. Penna insisted that communists’ primary offensive lay in promoting hygienic, eugenic, and moral “degeneracy.” “Subversive currents” of Marxism and liberalism, he claimed, would attempt to immolate the country in the flames of degenerative “moral weakening.” Setting a long-term tone for anticommunist pseudoscience, Penna concluded that youth and women lay at the center of this subversive-degenerative plot, as—once abandoned by their gender-deviant, working mothers— “ children are the preferred victims,” among whom “syphilis and venereal maladies produce great devastation; prostitution gathers its victims before they reach puberty; in them alcoholism, dementia, and crime find refuge.” Here, in what would become a rightist tenet, modernity and communism (and the associated evil of liberalism) portended a sexually and gender deviant, degenerative onslaught of moral dissolution.

[13] . 26 Typically, Salgado insisted that only proper moral and religious pedagogy could counteract moral and gender catastrophe, women’s abandonment of the home, and sexual deviance, re- prioritizing moral manhood and domestic womanhood in what Salgado called “the global launch of the New Man of the New Times” or the “reconstruction of Man.”

[15] . 45 Alceu Amoroso Lima, in some ways a friend and supporter of the regime, criticized officials as “opportunists” bent on exploiting the church without advancing its moral agenda. His specifi c complaints surfaced in a letter to Capanema that demanded a better, state-led imbrication of anticommunism and moralism, as nationalist, conservative, and religious prerogatives. Blithely conflating anticommunism and moralism, Lima insisted that the Vargas state must “react fi rmly against the growing infiltration of communism in our midst”; that is, it must combat “communism . . . the epitome of all anti-spiritual and therefore anti-Catholic thinking” by “combating seriously the immorality of the cinemas and theaters with honest censorship.”

[16] . 44 Accordingly, the Centro Dom Vital suggestions teemed with moral outrage about potential statism in pedagogy. The constitution of 1934, railed one critic, had allowed liberalism, socialism, bolshevism, and “Masonic Judaism” to “violate the natural rights of parents and the divine right of the Church” to inculcate morality. “The State,” he grumbled, “does not grant Morality.”

[17] . 42 Capanema’s draft made no mention of catechism, and Minister of War Eurico Gaspar Dutra advised Capanema and Vargas against Catholic religious education in the program.

[18] . 42 Filinto Müller, the fearsome chief of Vargas’s Federal Police and an erstwhile friend to Integralists (and Nazis), spearheaded the regime’s 1937 move to crush AIB. Müller used “the same tactics employed against the communists” to hound AIB members, and when rightist clergy opposed the disbanding of their fascist, moralist ally, Müller, at Vargas’s behest, moved to pressure these clerics into deferring to the regime. Despite his former closeness with the Integralists, Müller promoted the primacy of the state, looking with suspicion on cooperation between moralistic Integralists and the church.

[19] . 41 In a letter to Vargas, Capanema wrote that the projected youth organization would “provide an education that prepares the type of man that the Estado Novo needs to guarantee its survival, prestige and usefulness.”

[:2-2] Cowan, Benjamin A. (2016). Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil (em inglês). Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books. ISBN 9781469627519

[:0-3] Green, James N. (2017). «Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil. By Benjamin A. Cowan» (requer pagamento). Journal of Social History (em inglês). doi:10.1093/jsh/shx045. The popular unrest of the early 1960s coincided with gradual shifts in sexual and social practices among sectors of the middle classes that positioned themselves against the new political order. Cowan convincingly shows us in a meticulous analysis of documents produced by the military regime and its defenders that the generals went far beyond pursuing communists and corruption, as they tried to purge the nation of its allegedly polluted past. According to his analysis, the new wielders of political power considered that gender disorder and sexual promiscuity among Brazil’s youth, especially the supposed increase in homosexuality, were eroding traditional Christian values, the family, and the state. This moral panic among the regime’s supporters permeated their understanding of modern Brazilian society’s woes and was a driving motivation in their efforts to re-moralize the nation, as manifested in the obligatory “moral and civics” courses required in all schools, to offer one obvious example.

[:1-4] McCann, Bryan (2017). «Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil by Benjamin A. Cowan (review)». Journal of Interdisciplinary History (em inglês). 48 (1): 112–113. ISSN 1530-9169. But Cowan reveals a more prevalent sense on the right that the increasing prominence of premarital sex, homosexuality, birth control, marijuana use, and a host of other cultural transformations in Brazilian society were manifestations of communist conspiracy.

[5] Halperin, Paula (2018). «Benjamin Cowan, Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2016. Pp. 324. $85.00 cloth; $32.95 paper.» (requer pagamento). The Americas (em inglês). 75 (2): 436–438. ISSN 0003-1615. doi:10.1017/tam.2017.171. The documentation Cowan assesses is broadly impressive, even astounding, and includes interviews, military journals, surveillance and censorship reports, and police records. Cowan uses this well-rounded and meticulously pursued archive to cover important ground that takes us beyond established narratives in the historiography of the period.

[6] Dunn, Christopher (2019). «Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil - by Cowan, Benjamin A.». Bulletin of Latin American Research (em inglês). 38 (1): 109–111. ISSN 1470-9856. doi:10.1111/blar.12935

[7] Loureiro, Felipe P. (2017). «Securing sex: morality and repression in the making of Cold War Brazil». Cold War History (em inglês). 17 (3): 325–327. ISSN 1468-2745. doi:10.1080/14682745.2017.1341419

[8] Cowan, Benjamin Arthur (2010). «The Secret History of Subversion: Sex, Modernity, and the Brazilian National Security State» (Resumo. Obra completa requer pagamento) (em inglês). Universidade da Califórnia em Los Angeles. Consultado em 21 de agosto de 2018 – via ProQuest

[10] Pitts, Bryan (2018). «Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil». Hispanic American Historical Review (em inglês). 98 (2): 343–345. ISSN 0018-2168. doi:10.1215/00182168-4379753

[11] Mitchell, Gregory (2018). «Benjamin A. Cowan, Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Photographs, acronyms, notes, bibliography, index, 340 pp.; hardcover $85, paperback $32.95, ebook $24.99.» (requer pagamento). Latin American Politics and Society (em inglês). 60 (1): 176–179. ISSN 1531-426X. doi:10.1017/lap.2017.14. Anyone wanting to understand the recent rise and political entrenchment of the Brazilian right-wing Bancada BBB (Bíblia, Boi e Bala, or Bible, Beef, and Bullet Caucus) would do well to read (and heed) Benjamin A. Cowan’s book. Indeed, to read this book is to reckon with the legacies and logics of moral panic that would later resurface amid the more recent overthrow of President Dilma Rousseff by the BBB politicians now embroiled in their own criminal corruption scandals.

[14] «2017 Section Awards» (em inglês). Latin American Studies Association. Cópia arquivada em 3 de agosto de 2018

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