In Queer Emergent: Scandalous Stories from the Twilight of AIDS in Peru, Justin Perez explores how the global project to end AIDS has produced sexual and gendered subjectivities in Peru. He explores how the global health policies around AIDS have driven sexual modernisation and its contested articulation in the Amazonian Peru. Grounded in the best traditions of queer anthropology and the ethnographic method, Justin Perez places the stories and lived experiences of gay men and transgender women at the core of his analysis – showing how they construct contested understandings of sexuality, extend networks of solidarity and negotiate the technocratic global project. By doing so, this book challenges the assumption that LGTBIQ+ people are passive subjects of health policies, showing how queer and trans people in the technocratic project to end AIDS making it a lived and contested experience.
It is in the attention paid to tensions between the global and local that this well-written ethnography unpacks the temporal impulse of this global enterprise. Justin Perez brilliantly pays attention to how global efforts to end AIDS encompassed the mobilisation of resources and new terminologies that proposed a redefinition of sexual cultures, celebrating certain understandings of sexuality and selfhood over others. This new sexual modernisation presented new, desirable and egalitarian romantic–erotic relationships as opposed to transactional sexual arrangements – as in previous projects – and proposed a new modern standard of sexual subjectivity to the subjects of these policies. As with Vaibhav Saria’s work on Hijras in India, this book focuses on the tensions created between these ideal models proposed to the subjects targeted by health policies and the real lived experience of their interlocutors, in their own understandings and everyday ways of queer and trans world–making.
Queer Emergent is an ethnography that takes its participants seriously. Justin Perez engages with the term scandal (escandalo, a widespread term used among trans and gay people in South America), which he defines as a productive genre of embellishment with which his interlocutors not only tell stories, but intervene and even transform the project to end AIDS. Scandal has been a useful category for previous queer anthropologists focusing on Latin America, as can be read in Don Kullick's ethnography about travestis in Brazil in the 1990s. Justin Perez looks beyond an understanding of its tactical use to negotiate unequal conditions and analyses it as a genre with which his interlocutors produce intersubjective relationships. Paying attention to what Perez considers a particular art of embellishment and circulating stories, from narratives about denouncement to transactional sexual encounters, he explores the tensions created between the ideal subjects mobilised by global policies and how queer and trans people contested and reimagined what it meant to end AIDS in their own terms. Perez explores this genre as a productive force that crafted intersubjective experiences, tracing how these global policies made them speak about how they live morally, healthy and fulfilling lives in an era shaped by HIV/AIDS. It is in the tensions of this sexual modernity that the ethnographer challenges the assumption of that usually moralised subject of global health policies to find in the margins the emerging categories and storytelling with which his interlocutors made sense of their own experience.
This fascinating monograph synthesises six years of ethnographic work in the Amazonian Peru. From volleyball matches to grant applications, the author pays a good tribute to the best traditions of ethnographic research reflecting on his own interventions in the lives of his interlocutors. In line with his attention to the tension between global and local sexual cultures, the author engages with hemispheric discussion about sexual modernity as a labelling process. While reflecting on how to make the lives of his interlocutors in Peru legible to an English audience, the author offers interesting insights on the ethical and methodological challenges with potential to be translated to other experiences of doing fieldwork. In that sense, this book is an excellent example of the good use of multiple scales to understand how global and national processes are landed and even transformed by their local ramifications.
Justin Perez critically analyses how, in the act of telling stories, his interlocutors make sense of the conflicting temporalities shaping the recent past of LGBTIQ+ Peruvians. Perez analyses how his interlocutors interconnect and negotiate multiple temporalities related both to the Peruvian history of the internal armed conflict and the temporalities of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. It is from the ethnographic interpretations of Peche, a term used by gay men and transgender women to signify how they present themselves to incentivise erotic and romantic relationships, that Perez shows how the entanglement of multiple temporalities coexists and gets reinterpreted by storytelling, showing how the living present of the past shapes contemporary sexualities.
Queer Emergent also contributes to a deep historical understanding of the formation and administration of the third sector in Latin America. This monograph draws attention to the everyday effort to survive in shifting financial landscapes; the book is able to bring its subjects to life who make NGOs. Rather than showing them as subjects isolated, it is able to very clearly connect them into broader social dynamics that go much beyond the LGTBIQ+ community. Insights that in a world in which funding for global health and LGTBIQ+ policies is being depredated by the action of global right-wing parties and the Trump administration, become a valuable document of the past.
In summary, the book Queer Emergent will be a book of capital interest for all those invested in studying LGTBIQ+ world-making in Latin America and global health policies. It will become a book of reference for queer anthropology in the region.
