Scandalous denouncement: discrimination, difference, and queer scandal in urban Amazonian Peru

ABSTRACT

Over the course of the 2010s, one objective of HIV prevention efforts in Peru’s Amazonian region has been to mitigate the adverse effects of discrimination on transgender communities. Some of the technical experts implementing these efforts in the city of Tarapoto referred to ‘cultivating a culture of denouncement’ as a shorthand for this objective. This article juxtaposes two experiences of discrimination and subsequent efforts at seeking redress. While both involve trans women who were denied entry into a nightclub, one case was converted into a successful discrimination grievance while the other case was never formally codified as such. Ethnographic analysis of Yesika’s ‘unsuccessful’ case suggests that the imperative to file formal discrimination grievances as a form of HIV prevention, though intended to mitigate exclusion, paradoxically reinforces ethno-racial hierarchies, obscures the willful inaction of auxiliary municipal police, and subjects those who attempt denouncement to intensified allegations of being ‘scandalous.’ Yesika’s scandalous denouncement thus makes visible how preventing HIV is embedded in existing configurations of ethno-racial, gender, and sexual difference.

KEYWORDS:

• Discrimination
• HIV
• Peru
• scandal
• transgender
• urban Amazonia

Acknowledgements

Research was supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Inter-American Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. I am grateful for comments on early versions of this essay by M. Cristina Alcalde, Paul Amar, Florence Babb, Ulla Berg, João Biehl, Tom Boellstorff, Giancarlo Cornejo, Amy Cox Hall, Carina Heckert, Amy Krauss, Bernadette Perez, and the three anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Throughout this article, I primarily use ‘transgender’ and ‘trans’ in order to reflect the terminology of HIV prevention programs in Peru. In the news report, Godfrey used the term ‘transsexual’ (Gastelumendi 2013). This term was infrequently used while I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Tarapoto, Peru, from 2012–2018 on HIV prevention programs among gay, transgender, and MSM populations. Among the segment of the population formally categorized as ‘transgender’ for the purpose of HIV prevention, much more common terms used were trans, chica transgénero, travesti, or gay. More specifically, within the context of capacity-building workshops or efforts to file formal discrimination grievances, individuals referred to themselves as trans or transgénero. Travesti was used informally, but rarely did anyone indicate in a formal workshop, meeting, or discrimination grievance that they were travesti. If someone was talking about another’s experience of discrimination, they might call that person travesti. These patterns of nomenclature were by no means universal in Peru or throughout Latin America, as communities and scholars have configured travesti as a theoretical position, political identity, and research methodology (Berkins 2015; Cornejo 2019; Heckert 2019; Machuca Rose 2019; Wayar 2018). Because this essay focuses primarily on the context of HIV prevention workshops and the efforts at filing formal discrimination grievances, and more specifically on the experience of transgender women, I follow the practices of naming and categorization I observed ethnographically in these spaces and, for the most part, employ the terms ‘trans’ and ‘transgender.’

2. ‘Scalability’ refers to the process of identifying an effective health intervention or strategy in a pilot project, with the goal of then implementing said intervention in expanded or new contexts. As a central ambition of global public health, scalability emerged in relation to efforts beginning in the late 1990s to expand access to antiretroviral therapy and ‘the calls to scale up activities for HIV prevention, testing, treatment and care reflect a sense of urgency to tackle the challenges associated with the HIV/AIDS crisis’ (Mangham and Hanson 2010, 85). Given the persistence of discrimination and stigma towards transgender women in Peru (Perez-Brumer et al. 2017; Pollock et al. 2016), it was a logical step to imagine scaling up the culture of denouncement, as exemplified by Godfrey, across the country as a tool of HIV prevention. See Adams (2016) for a detailed critique of scale-up as operationalized by the Global Fund.

3. From 2012–2018, I conducted twenty months of periodic ethnographic fieldwork among gay and transgender communities throughout Peru’s Amazonian region examining the consequences of the Tenth Round of the Global Fund for these communities. From October 2014 – December 2015, based in the city of Tarapoto, I conducted participant observation at capacity-building workshops and interviewed both those involved in HIV prevention and the gay and transgender recipients of their efforts. I also accompanied gay and transgender individuals as they circulated discrimination grievances formally and informally in their everyday lives.

4. For an evaluation of the impact of the Global Fund’s programming in Peru from a socio-epidemiological perspective, see Amaya et al. (2014), Cáceres et al. (2010), Cáceres and Mendoza (2009), and Goicochea and Montoya (2014).

5. The imperative to address discrimination, of course, extends far beyond HIV prevention efforts in Peru. The internal armed conflict and its far-reaching consequences made racism and discrimination violently visible, even though these are based in centuries-long social relations (Manrique 1995). However, for the purposes of this article I direct analysis towards the link between discrimination mitigation and HIV prevention.

6. The passage of antidiscrimination laws in Peru, as Golash-Boza (2010) argues, indicate how the recognition of racism and discrimination have become part of national debates. Antidiscrimination laws that explicitly include sexual orientation and gender identity, however, did not exist at a national level in Peru during the time of my research. Rights advocates have interpreted the prohibition of discrimination on the basis of origin, race, sex, language, religion, opinion, or economic status, or ‘any other status’ (cualquiera otra índole) to include sexual orientation and gender identity. In Lima, because there was no citywide antidiscrimination ordinance that included sexual orientation and gender identity, ‘antidiscrimination ordinances [we]re instituted in some districts while not in others, and the types of discrimination included in these ordinances var[ied]’ (Alcalde 2018, 125). Also see Kogan, Fuchs, and Lay (2013) and Sanborn (2012).

7. Levitt and Merry (2009) call this process of the local appropriation and adoption of global human rights concepts ‘vernacularization.’ Like Boellstorff’s (2003) notion of ‘dubbing,’ vernacularization attends to the agency of individuals around the world who themselves discern and reformulate transnational ideas, alongside the inevitable transformations that transpire as concepts land in different contexts and accrue new meanings.

8. Nightclubs had long been a site for documenting cases of racial discrimination. Throughout the 2000s, the Peruvian media disseminated several cases in which nightclubs in Lima and Cusco were fined for discriminating by physical appearance (Golash-Boza 2010, 318).

9. In this specific context, Anderson used the term gay to refer to ‘gay and transgender.’

10. An anonymous reviewer of this article suggested that travestis were often called scandalous because of their association with the space of the street.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Justin Perez

Justin Perez is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He holds a PhD in anthropology and specializes in queer studies and critical approaches to health and rights. His research examines the consequences of HIV prevention among gay and transgender communities in Peru and has been published in The Oxford Handbook of Global LGBT and Sexual Diversity Politics (2019) and Sexual Diversity and Religious Systems (2017).