While researching anything from a gobbet to an essay, I usually find one source that contains a single sentence, buried between filler paragraphs, that is exactly what I need. This time, this source was Yuri Fraccaroli’s “Sexual and gender dissidents and the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship: between political memory and everyday memories [own translation]”.

Fraccaroli hints at something I am interested in: “passive” resistance. This type of resistance encompasses a person or community’s apathy towards the government or ruling population and their disengagement from politics. Essentially, people who do not subscribe to a government’s vision for the country, but do not actively do anything against it, just ignore it.

This was an issue in the USSR during Brezhnev’s government, as the population’s apathy deterred them from working hard, as they saw no benefit from it: they would not get fired, as the regime had to provide employment. The only incentive to be productive was either a genuine belief in the government’s aim of a communist society or pressure due to terror. The latter was neither sustainable nor available to Brezhnev as the Cold War had put the USSR under a microscope, and it went against his government’s main aim to raise living standards. Productivity plummeted, and so did the treasury. This is just to show how apathy can have a very detrimental effect in a dictatorship, or on any system of government.

My project will argue that during the Brazilian dictatorship, the youth’s apathy, and in particular the queer population’s denial of the traditional values the regime was pushing onto Brazilian society, made it impossible for the regime to achieve anything close to Gramscian hegemony. In basic terms, this concept of hegemony means that the ruling class must achieve consent across civil society for them to rule over it. The development of sexuality in the youth was antithetical to the society the regime had “sketched” out, a traditional, conservative society modelled on European moral attitudes like purity. Fraccaroli’s article is essential to understanding this piece of the puzzle, as it takes the first step in making this connection, as it hints at the power hidden in passive acts of resistance. Which was just what I needed.

References:

Fraccaroli, Yuri. “Dissidentes sexuais e de gênero e a ditadura civil-militar brasileira: entre a memória política e as memórias cotidianas.” Revista Uruguaya de Ciencia Política 31:1 (2022) pp.25–53. https://doi.org/10.26851/RUCP.31.1.2