Christian political hypermasculinity: Brazilian fascism in the 1930s

Abstract

This article considers the well‐crafted but often overlooked gender politics of the Integralistas, Brazil's largest fascist movement of the 1930s. Led by writer Plínio Salgado, the Integralistas, who allegedly reached one million members by 1935, became Brazil's first‐ever mass political organisation. They envisioned what they called a Christian holistic state (Estado Integral), one in which corporatism, nationalism and faith would sustain the country's very existence in opposition to communism, materialism and liberalism. Largely unexplored iconographic material reveal that gender appeared at the very heart of their political ambitions: a sexualised type of hypermasculinity pointed to an ideal Brazil rooted in Christian‐based notions of masculinity and femininity, having men as nation‐builders and women as family‐nurturers, and a racialised version of expected membership, with Blacks and the indigenous population welcomed only as infantilised male and female beings who depended upon much tutoring from self‐proclaimed grown‐up white Brazilian men. As this article explores, the politics of the Integralistas were not alone in 1930s Brazil.