Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil by Benjamin A. Cowan (review)

Even if Latin America were not currently witnessing a reemerging wave of right-wing political fervent at the time of its publication, Benjamin Cowan's new study of moralism and countersubversion in twentieth-century Brazil would still stand as an important and original contribution. Yet the core arguments of Securing Sex are given added currency in light of Dilma Rousseff 's impeachment in Brazil and the election of the conservative Mauricio Macri in Argentina—not to mention the legal ousting of democratically elected leaders in Paraguay and Honduras within the last half decade. As Latin Americans and foreign observers try to explain this new political landscape, Cowan approaches the history of modern Brazil from the perspective of right-wing discourses and their attendant anxieties—what the author calls a "moral panic" against the perceived threats regarding gender, sex, youth, and modernity.

Set against the backdrop of the Cold War and the subsequent military regime in Brazil (1964–1985), Cowan shows how this moral panic served as an ideological and practical foundation for Brazil's national security state. Intervening in scholarship on the global Cold War, on the era of dictatorships throughout Latin America, and also on studies of youth culture and political subversion, Cowan challenges the idea that the legitimacy of right-wing governments was built simply on a static brand of anticommunism. Rather, Securing Sex shows how authoritarian repression emerged in equal measure as an evolving effort to defend traditional notions of family, gender, and sexuality. It was this form of rightist moralism, Cowan argues, that created a culture of countersubversion that enabled and helped consolidate right-wing political regimes.

Securing Sex makes three primary contributions. In the first place, it offers a fresh perspective on the history of Brazil's dictatorship—a topic that in recent years has produced a particularly robust historiography. Seeking to understand the dynamics of military rule, Cowan explores the logics of repression held by both the perpetrators of state violence and its conservative supporters within the Brazilian polity. This approach shifts our focus away from the period of military rule itself to instead highlight the deeply rooted cultural and moralist dynamics that made the dictatorship possible in the first place. How could a violent regime rise to power, much less remain there for over two decades, if not for its ability to capitalize on existing social frameworks? More than simply claiming that Brazil's dictatorship did not emerge in a vacuum, Cowan posits that the threat of deviant, sexualized, and morally bankrupt subversives helped create a culture that was eager for the return of a right-wing political establishment. If a prevailing moral panic had initially conditioned the 1964 coup, the dictatorship was then able to stay in power by "constructing and conflating subversion, morality, gender, and sexuality" (48). In a military state where nearly anything could be labelled as "subversive," hippies, homosexuals, and hairstylists became as much of a threat as Marxists and revolutionary guerilla groups. Securing Sex examines this anti-communist moral panic in a variety of arenas including the teachings of the military's Higher War College (ESG), the surveillance practices of the security state, the censorship of cultural and media outlets, and the official education programs that sought to "immunize" Brazil's youth against moral subversion.

The book's second intervention is closely tied to the first: Cowan successfully re-centers the voices of right-wing Brazilians. By seeing these conservative discourses on their own terms, the author pushes back against the belief that "human rights violations were the province of maniacal, ideologically autonomous underlings—unknown and unsanctioned by the more urbane, presentable faces of the regimes in question" (5). By making a concerted effort to see these moralist perspectives as valid and complex, Cowan helps demystify the repressive nature of Brazil's dictatorship. In one sense, he argues that a "moral technocracy" formed to institutionalize...