ABSTRACT
In December 2011 Benjamin Constant held its first gay pride celebration. Tikuna lesbians and Peruvian drag queens gathered in a flamboyant parade sprawling through the small Amazon town. Benjamin Constant sits at the triple border between Brazil, Peru, and Colombia, where the Amazon and Javari rivers meet, near the region with most Indigenous groups in voluntary isolation in Latin America. 1 According to participants, the parade would have been larger had Cavallococha, a Peruvian old rubber boom town upriver, not been holding its popular annual drag queen contest that same day. How did Indigenous peoples come to participate in a parade for gay rights in one of the most isolated regions of the Amazon? What may appear as anecdotal raises less trivial questions. Mainstream studies of international relations (IR) dismiss the Amazon as irrelevant to political modernity. Yet lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual (LGBT) 2 perspectives reveal a vibrant cosmopolitanism at the peripheries of world politics. Informed by empirical research in Amazonia, this chapter explores the contributions of LGBT approaches for thinking IR critically.
