Sexualizing Youth: Morality Campaigns and the Representations of Youth in Early 1960s Buenos Aires

MANZANO, VALERIA

Journal of the History of Sexuality

University of Texas Press

Lugar: Austin; Año: 2005 vol. 14 p. 433 - 461

1043-4070

This article reconstructs two “morality campaigns” that took place in the City of Buenos Aires, in two different sociocultural and political contexts, 1960-1 and 1966. An analysis of the differences between the two morality campaigns as well as of the discursive production on youth during the early 1960s reveals the transition from the perception of an “innocent youth,” which needed public protection, to a “lost youth,” which, according to the rhetoric that emerged from the highest authorities of the 1966 coup d’état, deserved merely repression by the state. Far from having been laughable obstacles in the “rebel 1960s,” the morality campaigns and the discourses and representations which informed them are central to understand the brutal repression of the politicized youth in the 1970s. In both morality campaigns, conservatives discursively linked youthful sexuality to Communism or political radicalization and therefore constructed a series of images that would become increasingly common among rightist political actors in the 1970s.