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]
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]
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]
↑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.”
↑ abGreen, 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.
↑ abMcCann, 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. ISSN1530-9169. 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.
