Cynical Citizenship: Gender, Regionalism, and Political Subjectivity in Porto Alegre, Brazil by Benjamin Junge (review)

This book is part of a tradition of scholarship that views understanding citizenship as necessary for understanding the nature of democracy. Although based on fieldwork conducted more than 15 years ago, the book sheds considerable light on the state of Brazilian democracy today. Situated in the heyday of Porto Alegre’s international reputation as “a vibrant center of leftist political experimentation and civic participation” (1), the euphoria of Lula’s electoral victory, and the idealism of the World Social Forum, the book offers a nuanced multilevel perspective and careful analysis, identifying the underlying tensions and contradictions that would gradually undermine an ambitious political project and foreshadowing the threats they would subsequently pose for Brazilian democracy. In doing so, Junge’s book makes important contributions to literatures on citizenship and democracy—participatory democracy in particular—challenging much of the conventional wisdom of this field of scholarship through the sobering perspectives of ordinary citizens.

As with many texts about Brazilian democracy, the book’s starting point is the society’s inherent contradictions. Junge recounts the familiar story of democratization alongside a neoliberal response to economic crisis that saw the state withdraw from providing the social welfare guaranteed in the Constitution of 1988, two contemporaneous developments that exerted opposing pressures on citizenship. It is this expansion of formal citizenship rights alongside the expansion of inequality and marginalization that forms the foundation of “cynical citizenship.” But Junge extends this familiar analysis in important ways, adopting a “person-centered approach that takes into account how encouraged forms of citizenship resonate or conflict with the way Brazilians understand themselves as persons” (43). Junge builds on Katherine Cramer’s “talking about politics” approach, centering the voices of women who are leaders in low-income communities to understand how identities are used to interpret the official discourses of political campaigns. Their words and perspectives elucidate the ambivalence with which official discourses about democracy and citizenship are viewed by ordinary citizens—even by those who are politically active. On the ground, these political activists resist macro-level official discourses, challenging, for instance, the “hypocrisy” inherent in the selective representations of their city during the World Social Forum, in contrast to the official discourse of “another world is possible.”

Junge’s analysis also challenges conventions regarding the traditional idealistic approaches to participatory budgeting and normative views of democratic participation, which, the author argues, are seen as inherently good and represented as antithetical to apathy and cynicism. The book offers much-needed nuance to our understanding of citizenship and democracy, giving voice to the skepticism and ambivalence with which even active grassroots leaders approach politics. The ways in which low-income Brazilian women strategically chose to identify with and invest in the Workers’ Party discourses just as the party was rising to national dominance reveals their sophisticated and cautious political analysis, critical of a political project that purported to center them while leaving poverty and social exclusion largely intact.

The “cynicism” of these grassroots leaders, critiquing the “papo furado” (bogus discourse) (4) of Brazilian democracy at a time that it was broadly celebrated and held up as a model around the world, demonstrates the importance of centering the voices of ordinary citizens through the lenses of gender, class, race, and place. Although Junge at times substitutes his own “inferences” for the voices of his interlocutors (14-15) and centers himself in explaining their motivations (93), he nevertheless provides invaluable insights into the nuance and complexity of democracy by foregrounding the voices of ordinary citizens who are “simultaneously active and cynical” (7).

In many ways, Junge’s interlocutors sounded the alarm about the limitations of the Workers’ Party political project, foreshadowing the severe strain Brazilian democracy would subsequently endure, engendered by “weariness and loss of faith in the capacity for progressive reform initiatives . . . to bring about the society and citizens envisioned in the official discourse” (111).