Rafael de la Dehesa has written an empirically rich and analytically nuanced book that explores the rise and development of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activist engagements with the state in Brazil and Mexico. The two cases are ideal for comparative analysis: Movements in both countries emerged under semiauthoritarian regimes and operated as their countries transitioned to democracy, but the paths they took show striking differences, allowing de la Dehesa to argue forcefully for the importance of the local and the contingent as activists navigate the national and transnational fields in which they are embedded. As the concept of embeddedness warrants, even while pointing toward the importance of the particular and the agentic, de la Dehesa carefully shows as well how constrained, and enabled, activists were by the multiple fields in which they operated. Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil, then, successfully charts an analytical course that recognizes the powerful but nontotalizing nature of institutions, economic forces, and discourses.

Although activism around sexual minorities emerged in both countries in the 1970s, de la Dehesa points to some significant differences. For example, Brazilian activists focused their early efforts in the legislative arena, whereas Mexican activists were largely sidelined in such efforts for more than a decade, engaging in such battles only in the 1990s and since; blocked from the legislative field in the early years of the movement, Mexican activists focused more of their efforts on building alliances with sectors across civil society, especially feminists. In part as a result, while Brazilian activists have tended to adopt identitarian frames to advance their struggle, constituting themselves as one minority group—homosexual citizens—among others, Mexican activists have deployed an expansive frame of “sexual diversity” that addresses broad questions of gender and sexuality and links groups across various sectors of civil society behind the movement's demands. Another key difference is that Brazilian activists have sought support from parties across the spectrum, whereas Mexican activists have aligned mostly with leftist parties.

More than analyzing reasons for these differences, de la Dehesa uses their existence to make a theoretical intervention against those who argue that globalization, especially the transnational project of liberal modernity, has homogenizing effects, contending instead that local imperatives and constraints affect the process and outcome of activists' importations from the transnational field. For example, although it is true that transnational discourses and sexual scripts, following the terms of liberal modernity, adhere to an identitarian model of sexual rights that categorizes populations within narrowly defined interest groups (e.g., LGBT people), Mexican activists instead organized around a “sexual diversity” frame and advocated policies that were not circumscribed by narrow identity categories. The local conditions that Mexican activists faced—especially their limited access to the legislative field and, thus, the need to form broad coalitions across different sectors of civil society if they were to have any chance of success in the legislative realm—shaped their adoption of this broader, more collectivist political frame, rather than the transnationally hegemonic identitarian one. Under the banner of sexual diversity, activists drew connections across, and addressed a panoply of, issues that included women's rights, abortion and reproductive health, sex education, HIV/AIDS, sex work, affective partnership and cohabitation, and sexual rights. Using the Mexican case as an exemplar and emphasizing processes like selective appropriation and hybrid reinvention, de la Dehesa shows how activists in the so-called periphery do not simply adopt and reproduce transnational discourses that are typically developed in the United States and Europe but, rather, have a creative, adaptive relation to them that responds to local imperatives.

Another strength in de la Dehesa's account lies in the way he joins together institutional and cultural approaches to politics, especially evident in his investigation of the Brazilian and Mexican Left's changing relation to the question of sexuality during the 1970s and 1980s. In both polities, the partisan Left constituted an important, albeit initially hostile, field that LGBT activists had to navigate. Similar to its representation elsewhere, left discourse in both polities tended to depict homosexuality as a product of capitalist decadence. Leftists constructed homosexuality as foreign, a perversion associated with a culturally colonized national bourgeoisie, and something that would be corrected after the revolution. To account for the reasons that the Left in both polities became more open to sexual minorities over the course of the 1980s, de la Dehesa explores shifts in Brazil's and Mexico's electoral institutional fields and in the realm of meaning, especially with regard to questions of what constitutes the political and whom the Left should represent.

In terms of institutional shifts, the Left in both Brazil and Mexico faced a changing electoral terrain, in part due to the tinkering with electoral institutions by authoritarian regimes trying to channel and contain opposition to their rule. In the late 1970s in Brazil, for example, the military dealt with its diminishing grip on power by reintroducing a multiparty system designed to divide the opposition; by paving the way for the emergence of more leftist parties, each having to compete with the others for votes, this change in the electoral field opened opportunities for electoral alliances that both leftist parties and LGBT activists pursued. In Mexico, new laws that eased party registration requirements, as well as thresholds for winning seats in the legislature, similarly enabled a greater number of oppositional parties to emerge and compete, effectively opening more doors to LGBT activists.

Accompanying these important institutional shifts were changes in the realm of meaning. Where prior communist parties saw their constituency as the working class, developments during the 1960s and 1970s—for example, the emergence and growth of the New Left, student movements, the youth counterculture, and identity-based movements, as well as international leftist discussions about opening out toward these new sectors—reoriented the partisan Left toward a broader mass of discontented sectors within civil society. Accompanying that new understanding regarding the Left's constituency was an equally important shift in ideas about the composition of the political; the antiauthoritarianism of the youth counterculture, the emergence of a homosexual subculture, and the work of feminists in politicizing male/female relationships together inspired an expansion of the political to include the body, intimate relations, the family, and many other aspects of everyday life.

My first question arises here. De la Dehesa's argument that these institutional and cultural shifts made the partisan Left in both countries more open toward sexual minorities is compelling. In a more competitive electoral field and in a context where newly formed social groups were increasingly airing their discontent, it was strategic to address sexual politics and thereby reach out to newly politically active constituencies. But especially in light of de la Dehesa's point that LGBT activists initially faced hostility from the partisan Left, I would venture that an emphasis on the rational, strategic responses to a changed institutional and discursive context obscures an important aspect of the story, what I would call the affective or felt dimension of politics. To be sure, de la Dehesa importantly reminds us that political parties are not unitary rational actors but, instead, a negotiated order where meanings are challenged. I agree. But wherever struggles over meaning occur, strong emotion usually is involved. And when the discussion revolves around sexual minorities (or other “others”), we are in the realm of stigma and prejudice and thus in the realm not simply of strategy and ideology but of viscerality as well. The emergence into the public sphere of any marginalized group raises standard political questions about rights and equality, but it also tends to stir up feelings, in this case, I would imagine, potentially unsettling feelings about bodies, gender transgression, and non-normative desires and pleasures. An exploration of the affective dimensions of the partisan Left's initial hostility and eventual opening toward LGBT activists would complement de la Dehesa's already compelling institutional and cultural analysis.

The other questions I have also concern the felt dimension of politics. Throughout the book, de la Dehesa pays careful attention to the ways that activists navigate the transnational field with its norms of behavior for those states that wish to be considered modern. He notes that just as “a transnational construction of women as rights-bearing political subjects … has increasingly come to define what so-called modern nation-states just do” (p. 3), an evolving construction of sexual rights similarly establishes transnational norms for the treatment of sexual others. De la Dehesa acknowledges the power of this transnational project of liberal modernity while instructively showing us how local actors adapt transnational norms to local conditions. Again, Mexican activists, for example, have deployed a sexual diversity frame, rather than the identitarian one that dominates transnationally.

My questions arise with regard to a conundrum faced by activists in the “periphery” as they navigate the transnational and national fields in which they are embedded. On the one hand, in the transnational field sexual rights are increasingly associated with modernity and civilization and homophobia is linked to backwardness and barbarism; on the other hand, in the national field homophobia is sometimes defended as a manifestation of nationalism and tradition against the foreignness and neocolonial domination that homosexuality ostensibly signals. What a loaded and complex discursive context that activists must navigate! To argue for sexual rights is to risk being cast as a foreigner aligned with oppressive neocolonial powers. What does it feel like to be accused of being a traitor to your nation? Or to engage in a struggle that risks the “first” world's condemnation of your country as backward and barbaric? The intensity of having to straddle contradictory worlds and worldviews makes me wonder whether feelings of (un)belonging, outsiderhood, and ambivalence about self and society shaped these activists' engagements. How might national and activist emotion cultures, or better, emotional habitus, have shaped their navigations of complex transnational and national fields? De la Dehesa shows how activists deployed transnational norms in hybridized forms that responded to local imperatives and constraints. My guess is that the complex feelings entailed in being embedded in two sometimes contradictory fields shaped activists' navigations as well.

My main point, then, really is a surmising that more attention to the felt dimensions of politics would strengthen de la Dehesa's analysis. But even as I make that suggestion, I wish to conclude by emphasizing that his account already provides a tremendously nuanced and rich history showing how Brazilian and Mexican LGBT activists navigated transnational and national fields and took advantage of institutional and cultural shifts to make political demands of the state. Drawing from a colossal amount of empirical material—including more than 260 interviews and exhaustive primary research in organizational archives—de la Dehesa makes a substantial contribution to our knowledge of LGBT movements and of Brazilian and Mexican politics. Equally important, his comparative analysis deepens our understanding of how globalization, in particular the transnational project of liberal modernity, powerfully affects local activism, but in contingent and nonhomogenizing ways.