Research and Teaching at the Service of Social Justice
Investigación y Docencia al Servicio de la Justicia Social
Dissident Genders and Sexualities in the Andes: Truth, Justice and Reparations
Forthcoming Book
Rutgers University Press
Genocide, Political Violence and Human Rights series
January 2027
Dissident Genders and Sexualities in the Andes: Truth, Justice, and Reparations reveals how people of non-normative genders and sexualities fight for truth, justice, and reparations in the aftermath of armed conflict and authoritarian regimes in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. A focus on body politics flips the transitional justice model that focuses on nation-states to investigate massive human rights violations. How and why are harms against people of non-normative genders and sexualities included or excluded in Peruvian, Ecuadorian and Colombian transitional justice efforts? What strategies do activists use in the ongoing struggle for the recognition of their humanity through truth, justice and reparations? To answer this questions, this analysis focuses on activists and their embodied knowledge. A qualitative and cultural methodological design leans toward breath, more than depth, and honors the geopolitics and body politics of knowledge production.
Photograph: A figure dressed in all black including a black hat with a colorful Andean woven ribbon squats with their back to the camera. They are positioned at the center of the frame contemplating the LGBT memory quipu. The rainbow quipu, an artivist intervention collaboratively create by the Homosexual Movement of Lima in 2004, demands attention to the impact of the Peruvian internal armed conflict (1980-2000) on LGBT populations and claims national belonging through the ancestral Andean register of the quipu. The LGBT memory quipu is spread out in front of a fountain at the Eye that Weeps memorial in Lima, Peru. This controversial memorial, completed in 2005 by Lika Mutal in the Campo de Marte park, commemorates the more than 70,000 lives lost during the Peruvian internal armed conflict. The foreground is set against a beautiful shaded dirt path into a forested area.
Credit: Luz Mateo Cielo, Peruvian photojournalist.