Josh Siatkowski | Staff Writer
Wednesday afternoon, Dr. Benjamin Cowan, a professor of history at UC San Diego gave a speech titled “Sensualism and Socialism: Tracing the Moral Currencies of the Cold War in Brazil and Beyond”. Author of “Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil,” Cowan’s lecture detailed the fear of communism in Cold War Brazil.
During the war, Brazil’s right-wing military leaders feared that communism was seeping into their culture in some intimate ways. They alleged that a communist sect of nuns had begun overtaking schools, imparting Marxist values on their students by teaching them about the mysteries of sex through the use of Barbie dolls. These lessons on lasciviousness, they said, were planting the seed of a communist weed that would soon be too strong to defeat.
Cowan found that this belief in a machine that turns sexual experience into communist sympathy was actually the norm.
“I know this sounds rather fringe, but these ideas were not marginal,” Cowan said.
This “zany” story outlined the main idea of Cowan’s speech: that in 1970s Brazil, sexual deviance and political subversion were “wrapped into one alarming package.”
Cowan, a historian of Cold War-era Brazil, visited Baylor as the keynote speaker at the Charles Edmonson Historical Lecture, a lecture series that has brought renowned historians to Waco since 1978. Cowan’s lecture was the first of a two-part lecture series called “Mobilizing Morality,” which examines the roles of moralism and sexuality in the oppressive military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to1985.
Cowan was invited to speak at the prestigious lecture by Baylor professor Dr. Marilia Correa. As a historian of Brazil herself, Correa said that Cowan “is a very influential writer in [Cold War Brazil],” and that he is especially renowned for his “research on sexuality during the Brazilian dictatorship.”
In his research, Cowan found that sexuality played a shockingly significant role in discussions of communism in Brazil. He quoted Brazilian politician Cristovam Breiner to back up his claim.
“[Libidinous] excess is the greatest teacher of communist subversion,” Cowan said, quoting Breiner and smiling at the idea that sexuality could be so fervently argued as akin to communism.
Cowan’s deep dive into the chastity-crazed, right-wing militant leaders of Brazil came from the desire to learn how two teenage students kissing on a bus could be seen as the essence of communism — something a Brazilian official actually said after being on that bus, according to Cowan. Analyzing the origin and effect of this reasoning is the larger point of the “Mobilizing Morality” series.
In his lecture, Cowan said Brazil was suffering from “the anxieties of modernity,” and that “[right-wing Brazil] experienced modernization as a cultural crisis.” This fear about a changing world ultimately led an anxious population to “conflate sex with subversion.”
Cowan will tackle another question — the effect of this period on modern life in Brazil — in his second lecture, “Re-Christianize to Restore: Christian Traditionalism, Brazil and the Road to Christian Nationalism,” from 3:30 to 5 p.m. Thursday at Armstrong Browning Library.
