After the "End of AIDS": Collaboration, Care, and Queer Sociality in Urban Amazonian Peru
Thursday, April 6, 2023, 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. in HG 1010
Featuring Dr. Justin Perez, Assistant Professor, Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz
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.
Image: Miss Gay Chazuta. Tarapoto, Peru. Photo Credit Marlon del Aguila
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