Brazil's Sex Wars

Book excerpt: "This book presents an ethnography of LGBT activism in São Paulo, Brazil's largest city, during a decade (2008-2018) when Brazilian politics experienced a strong right-wing turn and increased partisanship. LGBT movements responded to increased right-wing opposition to sexual and gender autonomy in a variety of ways and Sosa analyzes this transforming political culture by examining debates over LGBT rights that extended across Brazilian political and public life--street protests, court cases, legislative campaigns, news coverage of violent crime, and television melodrama. That these debates play out in public allows the author to apply the lens of aesthetics, "examining what attracts us or repels us from political rights." The book begins with a discussion of how sexuality has moved from the private sphere to the political one as it came to be seen (by some) as a fundamental human right. The rest of the book unfolds chronologically. Chapter one traces the history of LGBT activism in Brazil, especially the push for anti-discrimination laws, and the debates about how to define homophobia. Chapter two introduces São Paulo's LGBT movement, and how over the decade preceding the period of study here, activists rethought what rights-based politics looked like via the kinds of actions they were able to perform. On a theoretical level, this chapter is exploring "activist subjectivity through the aesthetic category of judgment--or how individuals enter shared alignment through statements of perception." Chapter three revolves around the city's Pride parade, the largest in the world, and how that hyper visibility works in relation to everyday, less-spectacular forms of visibility. Brazil has a robust tradition of street protests, and chapter four looks at the intertwined aesthetics of queer politics and public protest via an ethnography with university students. The last chapter builds on these discussions as São Paulo, a center of LGBT activism and public visibility, also emerges as the center of a white, middle class rejection of the left-leaning governments that support sexual autonomy. The author suggests that the "debates" central to sexual politics actually engender, rather than reflect, two "pre-established sides to a public issue." A conclusion suggests that rights-based political paradigms are increasingly problematic for both the left and the right, as seen in the sex wars described in this book"--