Queer Emergent: Scandalous Stories from the Twilight of AIDS in Peru By JustinPerez, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2025, 264 pp. Price: 27. 95. ISBN: 978‐1‐4780‐3180‐2

Queer Emergent opens with a story its author, Justin Perez, had already heard during fieldwork. Perez takes ethnographers’ common methodological experience of listening to stories and places it at the core of his empirical and conceptual project. In so doing, he asks his readers to consider not just what stories tell, but what they do. In this ethnographic account of state/NGO management and activist responses to the AIDS epidemic in Amazonian Peru, stories inform, scandalize, circulate, and shape hybrid and evolving social worlds. The opening story, a firsthand account of a hairdresser who accompanies a consumer discrimination complaint against a bar through several months of bureaucratic delay, shows how stories take on a life of their own. Here we have a story (told to the ethnographer) about a story (the consumer complaint) that moves from informal queer life worlds to state bureaucracies where LGBTQ rights are adjudicated back to those initial queer life worlds in its retelling. Through these circuitous pathways, Perez tracks a “queer emergent,” the concept he employs to identify how his interlocutors “contended with the limits and potentials of the extant and conventional categories of sexual and gender selfhood” (11). Queer emergence is not sui generis. Rather, Perez shows how Peru's evolving relationship with the Global Fund to Fight AIDS provided the conditions of possibility for queer worlds to emerge how they did. In the introduction, Perez narrates the entrance of the Global Fund in the early 2000s, as Peru was confronting increasing rates of poverty and national debt, and a growing HIV/AIDS epidemic. Peru initially relied on the Global Fund to scale up anti-retroviral therapy. By Peru's third and fourth successful applications to the Global Fund, however, the government increasingly prioritized supporting HIV prevention strategies that emphasized community-based organizations (CBOs) that focused on LGBTQ capacity-building. By 2010, Peru's improved economic profile made it largely ineligible for Global Fund support, except that the AIDS epidemic in Peru was highly concentrated in vulnerable populations (gay men and trans women). Thus, CBOs and their staff of promotores (public health workers) have doubled down on a minoritizing discourse to secure diminishing funding. As a result, Perez notes, Peru presents a very different narrative around reducing HIV seroconversion rates (colloquially referred to as the “end of AIDS”). Whereas the “end of AIDS” in the global North has been marked by a re-medicalization of the epidemic, moving away from structural interventions and towards pharmaceutical fixes (like pre-exposure prophylaxis), AIDS policy in Peru has largely focused on combatting anti-LGBT discrimination and stigma. This view of differing global strategies might not have been so sharply observable had Perez studied Peru from coastal capital Lima rather than in urban Amazonian Peru. Perez's chosen fieldsite and his insistence on telling a national story from this place is a credit to the book and the project. The book engages medical anthropology by providing a detailed ethnography of the kinds of worlds biomedical technocracy configures (at least up to the point before the intended beneficiaries of that technocracy push back or respond in unanticipated ways). Here, the clinic, the safer-sex presentation, and other conventional representations of HIV/AIDS prevention are backgrounded in the ethnography. In its stead, Perez finds the culture of HIV/AIDS prevention in surprising places—like soccer fields, salons and discotheques. Promotores are most featured as storytellers and story collectors in queer worlds, but other people Perez encounters in the neighborhood or via social media add to the social tapestry. National traumas around AIDS merge with memories around Peru's internal armed conflict of the 1980s and 1990s. And citizenship/democratization projects merge with AIDS projects in “multisectorial health governance” (122) at their shared sites of concern—like ending stigma. What results through the ethnography is an AIDS-sphere-of-influence with hazy boundaries. Everything is connected to AIDS, yet few things are overdetermined by it. This presentation yields important insights, and it is only through the subtlety of Perez's storytelling that the book can unfold counter to the dominant categories of public health. One AIDS overdetermining factor Perez could not overcome is the biomedical attention fixated on gay men and trans women. HIV/AIDS prevention is always an uneven intervention into queer lifeworlds, and Perez is clear to show the moments of semi-misalignment between queer emergence and sexual and gender identities. In this ethnography of stories, Perez offers us a taxonomy of kinds of stories that fill the worlds of the queer emergent. There are the stories of peche (transactional sex) that carry the allure and the trauma of near-violent encounters detailed in chapter one. As transactional sex became a behavior both invented and scrutinized by AIDS-prevention regimes, peche narratives continued to bring together queer worlds. As civil society leaders in chapter three incentivize a culture of making denuncias (formal complaints regarding civil or human rights violations), they face the instability of the genre. Encouraging LGBTQ citizens to provide “emblematic” complaints that can serve as the basis for legal actions, community leaders and members alike face the lack of evidence that make a complaint not only actionable but respectable. As a result, individuals turn to scandalous stories, which may not make evidentiary claims but appeal to a shared queer sensibility of indignation at a homotransphobic society. Finally, stories perform not only qualitatively, but quantitatively, as they are retrofitted into cases and ultimately state and civil society data as told in chapter 5. As the chapters follow the arc of a single round of transnational AIDS funding from its initial promise to premature closing, Perez highlights the different kinds of stories that become possible until they are not. Queer Emergent pulls off the difficult feat of interweaving a robust discussion of macrostructures with the intimate events that sustain said structures. It presents a window into a way of life and horizon for doing AIDS and queer politics that was abandoned by funders the moment a new paradigm came along. What remains are stories, which Perez retells to the reader with both care and flare, like his interlocutors before him. The book is an indispensable critique of the “end of AIDS” discourses and so much more. It brings useful ethnographic insights into the explosion of sexual rights projects in Latin America in the 2010s, and it offers a great model for combining medical anthropology with political anthropology. Ideal for upper-level undergraduate and graduate seminars, the book speaks equally to anthropology, Latin American studies, and queer studies. I found the reflexive moments in the book, where Perez discusses his own role as the subject of or teller of stories, to be passages that would specifically generate classroom discussion. And, in the end, there is a lot to discuss. We all love a good story.