Suchergebnisse

What novel political spaces emerge at the intersections of global HIV/AIDS interventions and LGBT rights movements? As discrimination and stigma become the targets of global health initiatives, how do communities affected by HIV/AIDS position themselves towards notions of rights? And what is the social and political afterlife of rights-based initiatives after they are defunded or cease to exist? These are the central research questions posed in the dissertation. To address them, I conducted six months of preliminary fieldwork and fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in 2012-2015 among gay and transgender communities in the upper Amazonian state of San Martín in Peru. Through data collection techniques that included participant observation and interviews, I examined the social and political effects of a rights-based HIV/AIDS intervention for gay and transgender communities in the region. Among these communities, I found the peche concept to be particularly meaningful. The peche referred to the small gifts that gay and transgender people exchanged for the company, affection, and sex with heterosexual men. While sometimes construed as either a risky sexual practice in HIV/AIDS-related research or considered disempowering by LGBT activists, I found that the peche had historical depth and social extension. I problematize these narratives by developing the concept of peche politics to analyze the political practices that emerged in San Martín among the communities I studied. I situate these practices, such as addressing discrimination and homophobia through formal grievances or recounting and transmitting stories of the internal armed conflict, at the confluence of local myths about sexuality, national histories of violence and human rights, and global health initiatives. In my conclusion, I rethink the local, national, and global scales of this research and propose a hemispheric imaginary to open new analytical possibilities, especially in the moments when global structures of HIV/AIDS initiatives and LGBT rights recede.