Brazil's sex wars: The aesthetics of queer activism in São Paulo By Joseph JaySosa. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2024. 224 pp.

At a meal with colleagues shortly before the 2024 US presidential elections, we discussed the race between front-runners Kamala Harris (Democrat) and Donald J. Trump (Republican, president 2017–21). We were alarmed by the increasing likelihood that the Republican candidate would secure a second term, despite his deeply troubling record and divisive rhetoric. We wondered, what would it take for voters to reach a shared understanding of the values and behaviors considered unacceptable in an elected leader? One colleague mused that “we have to get back to a platform of human rights.” In other words, we must embrace a framework that upholds fundamental rights for all. And yet, as Sosa's Brazil's Sex Wars shows, ideas about basic rights are contested terrain, and even their definitions are being fought over in and beyond electoral politics. Amid a rise in reactionary politics in the US and around the world, Brazil's Sex Wars complicates notions of how rights-based movements, like those for LGBTQ+ groups, struggle for justice. In Brazil, former president Jair Bolsonaro campaigned on the slogan “human rights for the right humans,” thus excluding queer and trans people, Afro-Brazilians, Indigenous peoples, feminists, and others. To curry political favor, reactionary leaders across the globe have targeted groups minoritized according to their gender and sexuality. In this transnational rightward turn, different strategies for defending and gaining rights (or chipping away at them) are at work across the spectrum of political actors. Determining who the “right humans” are is a central component of the culture wars being waged for the dominance of one set of beliefs and values over another. Under the umbrella of the culture wars are the sex wars, and it is here that Sosa intervenes. He explicitly avoids a closed definition of what the sex wars are, because their shape depends on historical, material context, and also because his book argues against a binary understanding of sexual rights versus traditional cultural norms, understood in opposition. The sex wars are not for or against human rights; rather, they are part of a struggle to “define the rights-based regime that predominates liberal society” (p. 7). These wars set up for debate the question of who deserves rights and how they are enforced. Because of the ambiguity of rights, he argues, sex wars are partly carried out in the realm of aesthetics. By this, he means “the perception and judgement of forms” (p. 4), or how one experiences sensation and then comes to understand that experience in relation to their situated reality. Activists, then, are “aesthetic agents who entreat others … to see, hear and feel the politics of sexual autonomy the way that they do” (p. 4). This fight for sexual rights interpellates collective understandings of other concepts like identity, sexuality, and even democracy. The book's argument unfolds over five chapters. The introduction expertly sets the context for the empirical chapters. It offers a brief sketch of contemporary Brazilian politics, establishes the role of sensation in social movements, tracks the history of human rights discourse, summarizes trajectories of LGBTQ+ struggle in Brazil, and lays out how whiteness has shaped understandings of queer movements. A conclusion ends the book by drawing connections to Bolsonaro's election (which came at the end of Sosa's fieldwork). Throughout, he analyzes three sites: the media, organizations or groups, and the street. Sosa draws on years of ethnographic research that demonstrate his deep engagement with LGBTQ+ movements. Both the book's interdisciplinary approach and the author's application of intersectionality are impressive. Sosa speaks fluently from a range of disciplines, and he draws extensively from Brazilian scholars alongside queer theorists based in the Global North. In addition to sexuality, he attends to how race, class, gender, and age, as well as his experiences as an interlocutor, shape the movements he studies. I was particularly drawn to his critical theorizing of whiteness as a force that shapes narratives of the LGBTQ+ movement and that influenced his own anthropological experiences (e.g., pp. 17–22, 139). The chapters are rich for scholars and students of women's, gender, and sexuality studies (WGST), Latin American studies, anthropology, and more. As a professor of WGST and Latin American studies, Sosa sheds new light on familiar cases and timely arguments, and I could imagine the book inspiring class discussion. For example, chapter 1, “Homofobia, Out of the Closet: Mediating Oppression in Law, News and Melodrama,” offers a spatial-racial analysis of the “light bulb attack,” a case of homophobic violence that is often referenced in LGBT+ movement work but without the nuanced, intersectional read Sosa provides. Chapter 2, “Militância Isn't Cure: Aesthetics of Activist Judgement,” examines the phrase “I am also travestí,” offering a productive critique of the flaws in queer solidarity with trans and travestí members of the LGBT+ community and navigating differences within the movement. In chapter 3, “Visibilizando, Making Visible: Race, Space, and Sexuality,” Sosa's approaches to visibility as a situated process were helpful for shaping my own critiques of the double-edged sword of queer and trans representations. Anthropologists will find much to learn throughout, but I especially enjoyed the ethnographic approach in chapter 4: “Queer(ing) Protest Choreographies: Utopias beyond Rights.” It is, in part, an institutional ethnography of the group Equality Action. It is also where, for me, the concept of aesthetic activism came alive. For instance, descriptions of the shocking pink troop protesters (p. 109), who marched unified under pink gossamer fabric with only their heads visible, serve as an example of queer protest. Here (and throughout the chapter), Sosa includes pictures from his fieldwork that activate other senses alongside his thick descriptions. Chapter 5, “Making Sides/Taking Sides: Performing Rights through Debate,” illustrates how one might include policy analysis in ethnographic work (e.g., the chart on p. 147). This chapter closes by reiterating how the many scenarios he analyzes support a larger argument about the aesthetic work inherent in rights-based social movements: “Rights’ different cultural meanings, affective attachments, and strategic deployments show the flexibility of rights as a political form” (p. 154). Overall, Brazil's Sex Wars combines sharp analysis with good storytelling on the timely topics of gender, sexuality, and their weight in contemporary politics. Set in the Global South and told from a queer, transnational perspective, Sosa's book is a necessary addition to scholarship on the culture wars and justice movements. I found it refreshing to read about the sex wars in an analytical way—Sosa examines aesthetics as a means of engaging with debates with a nuance that is not about taking sides or assigning blame. The book's arguments are likely to become increasingly significant.