Brazil's Sex Wars

Brazil's Sex Wars is a groundbreaking ethnography focused on the aesthetic forms that gave rise to São Paulo's vibrant LGBT movement, as well as the anti-gender movement that elected Jair Bolsonaro. Sosa’s aesthetic analysis of sexual politics opens up novel ways of reading protests, pride parades, political debates, and sexual rights, while remaining keenly attuned to the ways LGBT movements fetishize and fail non-white, non-cisgender minorities. This book will become mandatory reading for scholars of social movements.

— Carmen Alvaro Jarrín, College of the Holy Cross, author of The Biopolitics of Beauty: Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil

Brazil's Sex Wars is an incisive analysis of how politics becomes sensible. Joseph Jay Sosa's novel engagement with "sex wars" and "sexual rights," grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork with São Paulo LGBT+ activists, challenges US-centric readings to reveal sexual politics as embodied, affective, aesthetic structures of feeling--raced and classed choreographies between governance (liberal and illiberal) and queer practice. As authoritarian, anti-queer movements proliferate across the globe, Sosa's innovative approach to the aesthetics of sexual politics will be required reading for anyone interested in how battles over sexuality and gender shape and reshape national politics.

— Margot Weiss, Wesleyan University, author of Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality