In Queer Emergent, Justin Perez explores how advances in HIV prevention work alongside broader economic and political shifts in global health to shape queer subjectivities. Drawing on ethnographic research among gay and transgender communities in urban Amazonian Peru, Perez describes how queer social worlds emerge through scandalous storytelling-a practice of exaggerating and embellishing stories about everyday life that transgresses social norms and hierarchies. Perez shows that through such storytelling, gay and transgender communities contested the assumptions of global HIV prevention's shift from the provision of costly antiretrovirals to the mitigation of social conditions like discrimination and stigma. He argues that the global ambition to "End AIDS" by 2030 is not just a technical project oriented at ending the epidemic, but also a project of sexual subjectification and ongoing social transformation. By taking seriously the scandalous stories that gay and transgender Peruvians circulated as they responded to new forms of HIV prevention, Perez reveals how they imagine possibilities of what could be as the effort to end AIDS continues to play out in the present.
Justin Perez is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Scandalous Stories of HIV Prevention 1 1. Stories That Scandalize: Transactional Sex and Postconflict Moral Imaginaries 36 2. Collaboration on the Cancha: Sustaining and Multiplying Social Relations through Scandalous Spectacles 63 3. Scandal at the Disco: Discrimination, Difference, and the Cultivation of a Culture of Denouncement 89 4. When Projects End: The Fragmentation of Collaboration and the Afterworlds of HIV Prevention 119 5. Stories That Count: The Pathways of Discrimination Stories 145 Afterword 171 Notes 179 References 215 Index 241
"Focusing on the impacts of shifting global HIV funding priorities on local communities in Peru, Justin Perez documents and analyzes the stories told by and among gay and transgender people as a response to transformations in global efforts to end AIDS. He importantly shows how storytelling operates as a form of refusal and resistance that challenged the underlying moral assumptions in Peru's response to the epidemic. A terrific example of thick description and ethnographic accompaniment, Queer Emergent makes important contributions to anthropology, queer studies, and global health." - Thurka Sangaramoorthy, author of (Landscapes of Care: Immigration and Health in Rural America) "Queer Emergent offers important insights into the formulation of queer subjectivities in relation to global health projects as they have unfolded in the Peruvian Amazon. Justin Perez uses the retelling of scandalous stories as a window into understanding how LGBTQ Peruvians challenge the moral projects of global health interventions. This is a timely book given the global health push for the elusive goal of ending AIDS and the types of projects that have resulted from this goal." - Carina Heckert, author of (Birth in Times of Despair: Reproductive Violence on the US-Mexico Border)
