Poverty, Sexuality, and Human Rights: Pluralism or Hegemony? Discourse of the Peruvian Catholic Church on LGBT Human Rights Within the City of Lima

This chapter analyzes the establishment of a conservative pastoral discourse within the Peruvian Catholic Church during the 1990s to the present in relation to LGBT people. This is the result of the articulation of two projects in dispute within the ecclesiastical institution: a fundamentalist Catholic project and another inspired by the work of liberation theology. To this end, an analysis from some psychoanalytic categories such as libidinal economy is proposed considering how ecclesiastical institutions since the 1960s have mobilized two pastoral discourses: the first on social issues and the second on nature-based interpretations about poverty and sexuality. Both discourses established a design of life that excludes LGBT people as actors of liberation. To analyze the pastoral discourses on the LGBT issue, two important events within the field of human rights in Peru are examined: (1) the publishing of the Commission of Truth and Reconciliation Final Report (2003); and (2) the process of enacting the National Plan on Human Rights (2005). These events reveal the contours of pastoral discourse on nature.