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

On April 17, 2016, the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies voted to impeach President Dilma Rousseff. As the deputies cast their votes, they gave short proclamations to justify their decision, dedicating their votes not only to their state, voters, and family but also to God. Others offered their votes on behalf of a variety of conservative causes célèbres, like schoolchildren whose sexuality might become muddled by Rousseff's party's supposed promotion of the concept that gender is a social construct. It seemed that a new right-wing era had arrived, taking advantage of Brazilians' conservative views on morality and sex. But was it a new era? As Benjamin A. Cowan's Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil convincingly demonstrates, moral panic and anxieties about sex and gender were key, but often forgotten, hallmarks of another period of right-wing ascendancy in Brazil: the 1964–85 military dictatorship, which began, like...