Brazil's Sex Wars

The Aesthetics of Queer Activism in São Paulo

By Joseph Jay Sosa

University of Texas Press

An ethnography and media analysis of LGBT+ activism in São Paulo during Brazil’s conservative turn from 2010 to 2018.

For decades, LGBT+ activists across the globe have secured victories by persuasively articulating rights to sexual autonomy. Brazilian activists, some of the world’s most energetic, have kept pace. But since 2010, a backlash has set in, as defenders of “tradition” and “family” have countered LGBT+ rights discourses using a rights-based language of their own.

To understand this shifting ground, Joseph Jay Sosa collaborated with Brazilian LGBT+ activists, who use the language of rights while knowing that rights are not what they seem. Drawing on the symbolic and affective qualities of rights, activists mobilize slogans, bodies, and media to articulate an alternative democratic sensorium. Beyond conventional notions of rights as tools for managing the obligations of states vis-à-vis citizens, activists show how rights operate aesthetically—enjoining the public to see and feel as activists do. Sosa tracks the fate of LGBT+ rights in a growing authoritarian climate that demands “human rights for the right humans.” Interpreting conflicts between advocates and opponents over LGBT+ autonomy as not just an ideological struggle but an aesthetic one, Brazil’s Sex Wars rethinks a style of politics that seems both utterly familiar and counterintuitive.

Brazil's Sex Wars is a groundbreaking ethnography focused on the aesthetic forms that gave rise to São Paulo's vibrant LGBT movement, as well as the anti-gender movement that elected Jair Bolsonaro. Sosa’s aesthetic analysis of sexual politics opens up novel ways of reading protests, pride parades, political debates, and sexual rights, while remaining keenly attuned to the ways LGBT movements fetishize and fail non-white, non-cisgender minorities. This book will become mandatory reading for scholars of social movements. Carmen Alvaro Jarrín, College of the Holy Cross, author of The Biopolitics of Beauty: Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil

Brazil's Sex Wars is an incisive analysis of how politics becomes sensible. Joseph Jay Sosa's novel engagement with 'sex wars' and 'sexual rights,' grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork with São Paulo LGBT+ activists, challenges US-centric readings to reveal sexual politics as embodied, affective, aesthetic structures of feeling--raced and classed choreographies between governance (liberal and illiberal) and queer practice. As authoritarian, anti-queer movements proliferate across the globe, Sosa's innovative approach to the aesthetics of sexual politics will be required reading for anyone interested in how battles over sexuality and gender shape and reshape national politics. Margot Weiss, Wesleyan University, author of Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality

Joseph Jay Sosa is an associate professor of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies at Bowdoin College.

Introduction: Formed by Rights
Chapter 1. Homofobia, Out of the Closet: Mediating Oppression in Law, News, and Melodrama
Chapter 2. Militância Isn’t Cute: Aesthetics of Activist Judgment
Chapter 3. Visibilizando, Making Visible: Race, Space, and Sexuality
Chapter 4. Queer(ing) Protest Choreographies: Utopias beyond Rights
Chapter 5. Making Sides/Taking Sides: Performing Rights through Debate
Conclusion: The Bolsonaro Archive
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index