Queer Emergent (Scandalous Stories from the Twilight of AIDS in Peru)

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.