In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Journal of the History of Sexuality 16.3 (2008) 459-481

Sex and the Security State:
Gender, Sexuality, and "Subversion" at Brazil's Escola Superior de Guerra, 1964–1985
Benjamin Cowan
University of California, Los Angeles

The maintenance of a reasonable state of national security constitutes a continuous and unceasing process . . . [because] the Nation itself . . . will always have contrary interests that threaten its sovereignty and freedom, circumstances that destabilize its internal life, and ideologies that challenge faith in its institutions.

Gen. Oswaldo Cordeiro de Farias, "A Segurança Nacional no panorama mundial da atualidade"1

In late March 1964 "contrary interests" and threats to "national security" reached an intolerable pitch, as far as top Brazilian military officials were concerned. Amid unprecedented polarization in national politics, populist President João Goulart accelerated his leftward drift, sanctioning radically nationalistic economic and social reforms. Goulart, nicknamed "Jango," even dared to support the unionization of enlisted men, a move that—from the perspective of an alarmed and incensed officer corps—constituted a direct threat to the military hierarchy. Anti-Goulart forces responded swiftly and unilaterally, and by the morning of 2 April Brazilians could harbor little doubt that Jango's reformist presidency had come to a sudden and dramatic end. A military coup d'état, supported by Goulart's civilian opponents and by the United States' diplomatic representatives, had begun on 31 March, its conspirators accusing Goulart of attempting to achieve a communist dictatorship in Brazil. The "Revolution of 1964"—for so the coup plotters dubbed their assumption of [End Page 459] power—claimed to have ousted Goulart in the name of anticommunist constitutionalism and "national security."2

Contrary to the expectations and the hopes of some civilian golpistas, however, the military quickly established a grip on power that would last until 1985—Brazil's longest dictatorship to date. Within days of the coup, Operação Limpeza (Operation Cleanup) rounded up thousands of suspected "subversives" throughout Brazil. These suspects were among the first casualties of the military government's long and repressive campaign to safeguard "national security" against "subversion"—a campaign that for twenty years strove to intimidate, silence, or sequester what opposition it did encounter from outspoken politicians, labor activists, students, and even a limited (and handily exterminated) armed guerrilla movement. Indeed, the regime's countersubversive "dirty war" played out on the very bodies of suspected opponents. Security forces detained tens of thousands of political prisoners, and the widespread, institutionalized torture of such detainees became something of a public secret. Over the course of the dictatorship, state violence took at least 195 lives; 144 further victims were "disappeared." Government control of the population, particularly at the height of the repression, relied on the resultant culture of fear, in which potential torture, disappearance, and/or death constituted everyday, politically deterrent realities.3

The decades of military rule and repression saw constant enshrinement of countersubversive national security as the regime's primary and unalienable responsibility, one that implicitly and explicitly justified dictatorship. Key military players—the architects of the 1964 "revolution"—had long since codified their security concerns in what they called a national security doctrine (NSD), which fundamentally linked defense and capitalist development in an ongoing declaration of Brazil's objectives and denunciation of the obstacles that stood in the path to these goals.4 Scholars have classified Brazilian NSD as part of a larger phenomenon of national security ideology (NSI) that gripped the hemisphere, and especially the Southern Cone, during the cold war. In Brazil and elsewhere, [End Page 460] NSI deployed interdependent appeals to nationalism, modernization, and anticommunism in an effort to guide and legitimate dictatorial and/or repressive political and economic programs.5 Extensive analysis has shown that national security ideologies looked to the state to guarantee security by protecting capitalist, "Western," and "Christian" values from external aggression and, more crucially, from internal enemies and an ever-invoked menace of communist "subversion."

Studies of regional NSI—and...

pdf