Anyone wanting to understand the recent rise and political entrenchment of the Brazilian right-wing Bancada BBB (Bíblia, Boi e Bala, or Bible, Beef, and Bullet Caucus) would do well to read (and heed) Benjamin A. Cowan’s book. Indeed, to read this book is to reckon with the legacies and logics of moral panic that would later resurface amid the more recent overthrow of President Dilma Rousseff by the BBB politicians now embroiled in their own criminal corruption scandals. One has only to recall Dilma, as a presidential candidate, being forced to prove, on national television, that she could still cook a proper omelet and be president to find eerie echoes in Cowan’s Cold Warriors and their fearmongering about gender roles, feminism, and the role of women resisters such as Dilma, herself a victim of torture by the military regime.
Cowan’s book begins with a scene on a public bus in 1974 in which a judge and supporter of the dictatorship spots two teenaged students passionately making out and proclaims that this is “communism today, instigated by materialist subversives, as subversion lies implicitly . . . in that libidinous excess which is the greatest teacher of communist subversion” (1). From this archival nugget, Cowan unspools, over the course of 250 pages, a trenchant exploration of morality and authoritarianism, spanning the period from the 1930s to redemocratization in the 1980s and focusing primarily on the years of the military regime (1964–85).
Cowan’s central purpose is to provide a history of the Cold Warriors and their relationship to right-wing cultural issues, particularly around gender and sexuality. Despite their constant cries for modernism and progress, right-wing leaders embraced antimodern moral panics and counted among their supporters many people who considered modernity a terrifying threat to the nation. Cowan’s book centers on this paradoxical alliance and the complexities of the logics that enabled it. He argues that these midcentury forces joined the military regime once the dictatorship was in place and contributed to moral panics in Brazil that linked communism and politically subversive activities with issues like feminism, abortion, sexual permissiveness, changing family structures and gender roles, homosexuality, pornography, sexually transmitted diseases, and free love.
Chapter 1, “Only for the Cause of the Pátria: The Frustrations of Interwar Moralism,” examines right-wing activism during the Vargas years (presidency 1930–37, dictatorship 1937–45). Here, it is striking just how often the right invokes medievalism and waxes nostalgic for a medieval past before the Enlightenment brought toxic modern ideas about knowledge, learning, and technology. Cowan shows that Vargas, skilled statesman that he was, sometimes tamped down this brand of right-wing activists and sometimes played them to his advantage. For example, Vargas would use ideas of masculinity and masculinization as central to advancing the state, and relied on his relationships and alliances with Catholic leaders and right-wing moralists, but resisted Christianization and neomedieval misogyny. Ultimately, though, the Cold Warriors would continue to press on moral issues in the coming decades. As Cowan states, “Though we think of post-1964 military authoritarianists as ‘modernizing conservatives,’ radical rightists’ antimodernism, developed in the era of fascism, formed the core of a moralistic anticommunism that would gain ascendency in dictatorial Brazil” (15).
Chapter 2, “Sexual Revolution? Contexts of Countersubversive Moralism,” moves readers forward into the 1960s to explore real and imagined phenomena, such as youth culture, sexual revolution, and radicalism. Cowan admits that the narratives about these issues at the time were so diverse and downright messy that it is difficult to analyze them as a coherent set of discourses. That is, right-wing activists linked changing sexual mores with communist subversion, but even those in society and the regime who feared and opposed such changes did not make these associations. More important still, the left certainly did not consider things like sexual revolution, feminism, or homosexuality to be centrally linked to its resistance.
Moving from the question of sexual revolution to an exclamatory response, the next chapter, “Sexual Revolution! Moral Panic and the Repressive Right,” intervenes in prevailing scholarly opinion that right-wing activists sowing moral panics were marginal in the regime to demonstrate instead, through careful and rigorous archival analysis, that these forces were, in fact, quite potent and successful in bringing anxieties around youth and sexuality into the debates about national security. It is here that we get the deepest articulation of Cowan’s theory of moral panics. Central to Cowan’s intervention, though, is that the Brazilian right used a transnational framework, invoking other right-wing activists and their concerns about hippies, drugs, and promiscuity in their efforts to enact repressive tactics that far outstripped any actual threat.
Chapter 4, “Drugs, Anarchism, and Eroticism: Moral Technocracy and the Military Regime,” focuses specifically on the military think tank known as the Escola Superior de Guerra (ESG) to examine what Cowan calls moral technocracy. It is in this chapter that we finally come to understand how a moral panic is opera- tionalized and deployed through particular bureaucratic means. How do generalized anxieties about women in the workplace, youthful behavior, or new media technologies become articulated through the state security police? The ESG’s moralism often takes the form of pathology and pseudoscience, but it is only in the next chapter, “Young Ladies Seduced and Carried Off by Terrorists: Secrets, Spies, and Anticommunist Moral Panic,” where we see how these ESG ideas play out in other police and intelligence services. There, categorical alarm about youth, and especially about women’s sexuality and behavior, translates into repression at the ground level, as the state surveilled “sexual deviants” and spied on educators thought to be corrupting the sexual morality of young people.
In Chapter 6, “Brazil Counts on Its Sons for Redemption: Moral, Civic, and Countersubversive Education,” Cowan examines moral education efforts in the schools, using textbooks and classroom materials to link such efforts to moral hygiene movements of the past. Despite the particular anxieties about women described in the previous chapter, these educational programs focused overtly on men and masculinity.
Finally, in chapter 7, “From Pornography to the Pill: Bagunça and the Limitations of Moralist Efficacy,” Cowan details how the rightists came to be marginalized during democratization as the regime devolved into a bagunça, or mess. Here the state’s inability to continue upholding the rightists’ desired moral outcomes is most apparent. In the most delightful part of the book, Cowan offers readers a section on pornochanchadas, or soft-core pornographic light comedies. Embrafilme, the state film agency, produced huge numbers of films like Sex Bandits, The Night of the Fetishes, and The Secretaries . . . Who Do Everything. In each, the film can only conclude with a brief moral lesson, as any sexual deviance is quickly punished and marriage, fidelity, and normativity are rewarded in oddly tacked-on “happy endings.” Cowan reads the pornochanchada as indicative of the waning influence of the moralists and as an example of the paradoxes that emerge within the regime during its final years.
Taken as a whole, the book is a deep dive into the moral anxieties and sexual insecurities of the Brazilian right. The analysis is sharp, and Cowan writes both confidently and persuasively. The scope of his knowledge and his ability to sift through the labyrinthine bureaucratic structures and cast of characters in the regime—ranging from well-known leaders to previously overlooked bit players—is impressive, to say the least. Most important, the book takes the right seriously on its own terms, which is long overdue.
Still, the book cannot do everything. There is very little discussion of race or racialization. Perhaps it simply was not in the historical records in question, but this absence feels most acute precisely because other scholars have so painstakingly demonstrated that race has always been intertwined with questions of gender and sexuality in Brazil. More discussion of race would have been especially helpful in revealing how Brazil avoided (or failed to avoid) the much more overtly racially charged moral panics in the United States and elsewhere that, Cowan argues, were influential among the Brazilian right.
Another curious omission is popular entertainment. Many of the most recognizable examples of right-wing repression of sexuality are absent. There is little discussion of Tropicalia and only a passing reference to the exiling of Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, the latter of whom embodied many of the regime’s anxieties about sexuality. Likewise, discussion of popular performers such as the outlandish drag troup Dzi Croquettes (who fled the regime for Paris) might have given readers a stronger sense of what moralists were actually seeing, including some legitimately transgressive and threatening displays of gender deviance among the left.
As Tom Jobim famously warned, “O Brasil não é para principiantes” (Brazil is not for beginners). Neither is Cowan’s book. This is a monograph for Brazilianists already well versed in the historical, anthropological, and political literature on Brazil. It is a dense and sometimes dizzying account of Brazilian bureaucracy and intragovernmental disputes—the glossary of acronyms comes in handy—that would probably leave undergraduates in survey courses adrift. Yet it is a monograph of great importance for those scholars of Brazil who think they know this particular period—as well as those who hope to understand its perilous present.
