
He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Brazil's Sex Wars: The Aesthetics of Queer Activism in São Paulo, and reported the following:
In the 2000s, São Paulo, Brazil claimed the largest LGBTQ Pride parade in the world, a figure celebrated by queer activists, questioned by local reporters, and challenged by religious conservatives. The parade, and particularly its size, seems like an odd point of contention in debates over gender, sexuality, rights, and identity. But as my book, Brazil’s Sex Wars, elaborates, seemingly trivial disagreements like those over crowd size stood in for larger struggles to define the role of LGBTQ human rights projects in Brazil’s story of modernity, democracy, the rise of the authoritarian right.Learn more about Brazil's Sex Wars at the University Of Texas Press website.
Page 99 brings the reader into the thick of the action. In a chapter on the promise and perils of visibility, we are dropped into a scene where queer activists debate what it means to “assume one’s identity” (the Brazilian version of “coming out”) in an urban crowd where one stood little chance of being singled out by journalists’ cameras. This example is one of a coterie of strategies activists used to deploy their bodies in the urban space to aestheticize and transform the meaning of human rights.
Does page 99 convey the central argument to the reader? Probably not in the sense that the reader couldn’t articulate ‘what the book is about’ from that page alone. But it does convey themes that are central to the book. How did urban and media performances actively (re)shape human rights paradigms in a decade of political transition in Brazil? How do activists deploy rights aesthetically, ie. getting the public to see (and think and feel) about rights in the same way they do? Finally, how has the language of rights, once the domain of the left, been taken up across the ideological spectrum?
--Marshal Zeringue