Sexo sob controles: da liberação ao sexo seguro

Abstract

This academic research studies neoliberal governments and their posture toward romantic and sexual relationships. Starting from notes about sexuality in the pre-AIDS era, it highlights the transgressive and experimental potential that it embraced, setting the scenario in which AIDS emerges, which echoed the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This research maps the gay scene in São Paulo, describing it from the period of confinement in ghettos to its gradual acceptance and normalization in market niches as well as its representation in current institutional politics. This research recounts official history of AIDS and its construction as a scientific truth, punctuating discontinuities and contradictions. It addresses resizing of AIDS since its outbreak (when it was treated as a "gay epidemic") up to its updated version as a public health problem related to development and a target for programs involving international agencies, States, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and individual citizens. This research displays the Brazilian AIDS-fighting program as an exemplar neoliberal public policy in which the citizen is called upon to be responsible for the production and management of his or her own health. This research analyzes the pedagogic effects of the safe sex concept guiding today's sex and love relations as being in line with current capitalism, including some of its products: the virtualization of sex and the strengthening of the family as a reproductive of practices engaged in the implementation of human capital