Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “‘A Child Is Being Beaten’” and the scenography of fantasy: boutique ultraliberalism in a Brazilian moral panic

Abstract

Commemorating the centenary of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, this article reads Freud’s essay alongside the contemporaneous “‘A Child Is Being Beaten’” in order to develop a theory of fantasy as the compulsive repetition of variations of a scene. Extending Berlant’s (2014b) analysis, the theory of scenic fantasy developed herein rivals left Lacanian approaches and better explains moral panics, such as the one around Queermuseu, a Brazilian art exhibit that provoked protest by the ultraliberal Movimento Brasil Livre and elements of the New Right.