“If we can show that we are helping adolescents to understand themselves, their feelings and their needs, then we are doing [a] valuable job”: counselling young people on sexual health in the Brook Advisory Centre (1965–1985)

First opened in 1964 in London, the Brook Advisory Centres (BAC) were the first centres to provide contraceptive advice and sexual counselling to unmarried people in postwar Britain. Drawing on archival materials, medical articles published by BAC members and oral history interviews with former counsellors, this paper looks at tensions present in sexual health counselling work between progressive views on young people’s sexuality and moral conservatism. In so doing, this paper makes two inter-related arguments. First, I argue that BAC doctors, counsellors and social workers simultaneously tried to adopt a non-judgmental listening approach to young people’s sexual needs and encouraged a model of heteronormative sexual behaviours that was class-based and racialised. Second, I argue that emotional labour was central in BAC staff’s attempt to navigate and smooth these tensions. This emotional labour and the tensions within it is best illustrated by BAC’s pyschosexual counselling services, which on the one hand tried to encourage youth sexual pleasure and on the other taught distinctive gendered sexual roles that contributed to pathologising teenage sexual behaviours and desire.In all, I contend that, in resorting to an emotionally orientated counselling, BAC members reconfigured for the young the new form of sexual subjectivity that had been in the making since the interwar years, that is, the fact that individuals regarded themselves as sexual beings and expressed feelings and anxieties about sex. BAC’s counselling work was as much a rupture with the interwar contraceptive counselling tradition—since it operated in a new climate, stressed a non-judgmental listening approach and catered for the young—as it was a continuity of some of the values of the earlier movement.

The Natural Profits of Their Years of Labor

This article uses the politics of old age to help explain the moral conservatism of the American welfare state. It argues that the onset of Fordism caused both uneven economic displacement of old workers and broader anxiety among social reformers about dependency and the forms of social disorder it produced by disturbing normative families. The management of this disturbance became a key promise of the movement for old-age pensions in the 1920s, in which Progressive labor reformers and conservative workers’ and fraternal organizations combined in an effort to support and rehabilitate the patriarchal family form through social policy. This logic ultimately became embedded in Social Security. Grasping this helps clarify the conservative dimensions of the New Deal as a moment of class, state, and racial formation.

Is Right-wing Populism a Phenomenon of Religious Dissent? The Cases of the Lega and the Rassemblement National

The current global political landscape is increasingly marked by the growth of right-wing populist parties. Although this party family has been the subject of a bourgeoning scholarship, the role played by religion in shaping its ideology is still an under-researched topic. Drawing on the qualitative context analysis of a large database of newspaper articles, electoral manifestos, and parties’ documents, this article studies the influence of religion on the political platforms of the Lega Nord (LN – recently rebranded just Lega) in Italy and the Front National (recently renamed Rassemblement National – RN) in France since the early 1980s. Our aim is twofold. Firstly, we would like to describe the role of religious values in the different political phases of the life of these parties. Secondly, we wish to assess whether and to which extent the appropriation of religion by these parties can be considered a phenomenon of religious dissent. Our analysis focuses on LGBT+ rights, a policy field that tends to bear the imprint of religion norms. Past studies have noted that right-wing populist parties support not only a nativist idea of citizenship, which prompts anti-immigrants and anti-Islamic stances, but also conservative interpretations of Christian values in terms of family issues and gender roles. In the last three decades, European right-wing populist parties have partly revised their positions on these issues. While some of them have strengthened or made only marginal changes to their religiously-inspired moral conservatism, others have shown new openings on gender equality and LGBT+ rights.

Legal Threats and the Emergence of Legal Mobilization: Conservative Mobilization in Colombia

Though the Colombian Constitutional Court has had a lead role in granting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) rights since 1998, conservatives mobilizing against LGBT rights between 1991 and 2007 were active in Congress and the streets rather than in court. After 2007, however, conservatives have maintained consistent opposition to rights claims made by LGBT people in the Constitutional Court. This article draws from fieldwork examining the significance of the Constitutional Court’s transition from granting rights to LGBT people as individuals to granting rights to LGBT people as couples and potential families to theorize conservative legal mobilization, particularly moral conservatism. To account for the rise of conservative legal mobilization against LGBT rights in Colombia in 2007, this article expands on the legal opportunity structure model. It theorizes that legal threats––that is, changes in legal rules that are perceived to increase the costs of mobilization or the expected costs of not taking action––are among the factors that lead movements to engage in legal mobilization, even if legal opportunities are not expanding.

RELIGION AND MORAL CONSERVATISM IN BRAZILIAN POLITICS

Brazil has experienced a great deal of political instability and a strengthening of conservatism since the last presidential election and which, during the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, suffered one of its most critical moments. The objective of this communication is to analyse the important role played by religious actors during this process and to demonstrate how the political alliances established between Pentecostals and Charismatic Catholics in the National Congress has made possible a series of political initiatives aimed at dismantling the expansion of human rights and policies of the Workers Party governments. With an anti-Communist spirit and a conservative vision of sexual morality and gender relations, these political groups have in recent years approached the social movement Schools without Party (Escola sem partido) and today represent an enormous challenge to Brazilian democracy.

The legacy of Pitirim Sorokin in the transnational alliances of moral conservatives

This article examines the legacy of Pitirim A. Sorokin (1889–1968), a Harvard sociologist from the Russian emigration. The authors scrutinise Sorokin as one of the nodal points for today’s moral conservatism. As a scholar, Sorokin has been relegated to the margins of his discipline, but his legacy as a public intellectual has persisted in the United States and has soared in Russia over the last three decades. This article examines Sorokin’s reception in these two nations, some of whose citizens have facilitated the burgeoning transnational phenomenon of twenty-first-century moral conservatism. Four aspects of Sorokin’s legacy are especially relevant in this context: his emphasis on values, his notion of the ‘sensate culture’, his ideas about the family, and his vision for moral revival. The authors conclude that Sorokin functions as a nodal point that binds together individual actors and ideas across national, cultural and linguistic barriers. The article is based on a firsthand analysis of moral conservative discourse and documents, on qualitative interviews and on scholarly literature.