Securing Sex is a major contribution to our understanding of the Brazilian military dictatorship of 1964 to 1985, using balanced, rigorous interdisciplinary methodology to offer new perspectives on a dark period in Brazilian history. The book explores the evolution and adaptation of a highly flexible and sometimes inchoate political right wing to cultural change, and the subsequent articulation of understandings of sexuality, decency, and citizenship in response to those adaptations. Cowan analyzes in detail the connection between Brazil’s right wing and a broader fear of modernization to show how right-wing thinkers and policymakers conflated changing social mores with communist subversion. In some cases, right-wing leaders did so disingenuously, to attract support for their own repressive goals. 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...

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