"After the 'End of AIDS': Collaboration, Care, and Queer Sociality in Urban Amazonian Peru

The introduction and scale-up of novel biomedical technologies has radically transformed the global HIV/AIDS landscape, heralding calls to control the global epidemic and "end AIDS" by 2030. In Peru, where HIV/AIDS is concentrated among gay men and transgender women in the urban centers of the country's Pacific coast and Amazonian region, efforts to "end AIDS" brought demands that gay and transgender Peruvians denounce homo- and trans-phobic discrimination, embrace egalitarian sexual practices, and adhere to biopharmaceutical HIV prevention. Based on ethnographic fieldwork (2012-2018) among gay and transgender communities in urban Amazonian Peru, this talk explores how they reimagined social relations through emergent forms of care and collaboration amidst the abrupt and unexpected discontinuation of a key HIV prevention intervention in 2015. In experiencing the broader failures of HIV prevention through the breakdown of social relations within their community, interlocutors rendered the "end of AIDS" not just as an experiment in health governance but, more deeply, as an ongoing and unfinished project of queer subjectification.

Dr. Justin Perez, Assistant Professor, Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

Having received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from UCI in 2017, Dr. Justin Perez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Latin American & Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research investigates how technological and biomedical developments in HIV prevention, alongside broader economic and political transformations in global health, shape queer subjects across Latin America. He extends these questions through ethnographic fieldwork among gay and transgender communities in urban Amazonian Peru. His current book manuscript, Queer Emergent: Scandalous Stories at the Twilight of AIDS, focuses specifically on the effects of the Tenth Round of The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria in Peru. In following the implementation of (1) legal initiatives intended to address AIDS-related discrimination and (2) behavioral interventions intended to address risky sexual practices, the book shows how HIV prevention made visible broader imaginations about the subjects and social conditions necessary to engender a future "End of AIDS."

For disabilities accommodations, questions, and information please contact: Rachel O'Toole rotoole@uci.edu

Sponsored by: UCI Illuminations, the UCI Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies, and the UCI History Department

Image Credit: Miss Gay Chazuta. Tarapoto, Peru. Photo Credit Marlon del Aguila

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