Queer Emergent: Scandalous Stories from the Twilight of AIDS in Peru [Hardcover]

InQueer 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.USJustin Perez explores how advances in HIV prevention work alongside broader economic and political shifts in global health to shape queer subjectivities in urban Amazonian Peru.Justin Perez is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.“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 ethnographlÃ0