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This dissertation offers a critical reading of Peru’s national discourses and the internal armed conflict through the lens of queer/cuir theory, decolonial critique, and memory studies. This study argues that gender and sexuality were not peripheral issues during the armed conflict, but central elements in shaping citizenship, national belonging, and the logic of war deployed by both the state and subversive armed groups. Specifically, it examines how homophobic violence during the conflict, committed by the Peruvian Armed Forces, Shining Path (PCP-SL), and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), was not incidental but instrumental. These groups targeted LGBTQ+ individuals as part of broader strategies to enforce ideological and moral order. The MRTA, for instance, executed those deemed deviant from heteronormativity, while the PCP-SL carried out brutal acts to police gender and sexual roles. These actions, and the complicity of broader society, reveal a deeply rooted homophobia that permeated national discourse. This study argues that heteronormativity and gender binarism not only shaped the conflict but also structured the broader national order, becoming one of the main sources of violence.
Moreover, this dissertation focuses on three cultural archives: the CVR’s Informe Final, El Museo Travesti del Perú by Giuseppe Campuzano, and the testimonial/literary work of José Carlos Agüero. It argues that the work of Campuzano and Agüero challenges normative frameworks of memory and reconciliation by using aesthetics of fragmentation, doubt, and excess. Their work is critical and resist the national call for unity through sameness and instead question and reimagine the nation from sites of marginalization and ambiguity. This dissertation contends that any meaningful reconciliation must confront the systemic erasure of queer lives