Peche problems

Abstract

As declarations of a possible “end of AIDS” emerged during the epidemic's fourth decade, some HIV‐prevention efforts shifted to address social conditions and individual dispositions among the populations most affected. In Peru, where HIV was concentrated among transgender women and gay men, health science positioned transactional sex as one site of intervention. Gay and transgender communities themselves circulated stories that dramatized transactional sex. Set against the backdrop of Peru's armed conflict (1980–2000), these stories pivoted on peches—the small gifts given to incentivize sexual and romantic relationships—and reflected a shared moral imaginary linked to the context of postconflict society. Interpreting transactional sex like a peche illuminates the moral dimensions of the category and suggests that the technical project of achieving an “end of AIDS” future is also imaginative and moralizing. Peches thus offer an interpretive approach to the persistent tensions between local and globalized categories, in relation to both HIV/AIDS and more broadly to other contexts. [sexuality, transactional sex, HIV/AIDS, end of AIDS, gay, transgender, morality, Peru]