MHS-2410 Lecture Notes - Lecture 25: Constitution Of Brazil, Paraphilia, Miscegenation
Document Summary
The measures instituted to combat aids reflect persistent centrality of sex and disease as sites for modernizing and developing the brazilian state and nation. Two constructs: brazilian sexual uniqueness, and the imperative for developing a nation state within a framework of of political and scientific modernity. Brazil response to aids as a lens through which to examine a contemporary political context in which nations, bodies, and sexualities are evaluated against imperatives of political and scientific modernity. Representations of brazilian colony are marked by duality that contrasts lush vegetation and tropical climate against the alleged barbarity of its inhabitants. Eugenics: the economic, political, and moral inferiority of non-whites are byproducts of genetics. The bodies of europeans were ill adapted to the tropical climate, making miscegenation a necessary step in national development by allowing the transfer of european civilization to a new physical and national body. Hypersexuality was an adaptive characteristic rather than a mechanism of degeneration.