Sexuality and Kinship in Post-Soviet Armenia by Tamar Shirinian Department of Cultural Anthropol

387 Pages·2016·1.56 MB·English

by  Tamar Shirinian

Survival of a Perverse Nation: Sexuality and Kinship in Post-Soviet Armenia

by

Tamar Shirinian

Department of Cultural Anthropology
Duke University

Date: __________________________

Approved:

__________________________
Diane M. Nelson, Supervisor

__________________________
Anne Allison

_____________________________
Anne-Maria Makhulu

_____________________________
Tomas Matza

_____________________________
Ara Wilson

Dissertation submitted in partial approval of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Cultural Anthropology in the Graduate
School of Duke University

2016
Abstract

Survival of a Perverse Nation: Sexuality and Kinship in Post-Soviet Armenia

by

Tamar Shirinian

Department of Cultural Anthropology
Duke University

Date: ________________________

Approved:

________________________
Diane M. Nelson, Supervisor

________________________
Anne Allison

________________________
Anne-Maria Makhulu

________________________
Tomas Matza

________________________
Ara Wilson

An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Cultural Anthropology in
the Graduate School of Duke University

2016
Copyright by
Tamar Shirinian
2016
Abstract

Survival of a Perverse Nation traces the ways in which contemporary Armenian anxieties
are congealing into the figure of the “homosexual.” As in other post-Soviet republics,
homosexuality has increasingly become defined as the crisis of the times, and is
understood by many as a destructive force linked to European encroachment. In Armenia,
a growing right-wing nationalist movement since 2012 has been targeting LGBT and
feminist activists. I suggest that this movement has arisen out of Armenia’s concerns
regarding proper social and biological reproduction in the face of high rates of emigration
of especially men in search of work. Many in the country blame this emigration on a
post-Soviet oligarchy, with close ties to the government. This oligarchy, having quickly
and massively privatized and liquidated industry and land during the war over the region
of Nagorno-Karabagh (1990-1994) with Azerbaijan, created widespread
un(der)employment. A national narrative attributing the nation’s survival of the 1915
Genocide and dispersion of its populations to strong morality preserved by institutions
such as the Church and the family has now, in the post-Soviet era, ruptured into one of
moral “perversion.” This dissertation is based on 15 months of ethnographic research,
during which I participated in the work of two local non-governmental organizations:
Public Information and Need for Knowledge, an LGBT rights organization and Women’s
Resource Center, a feminist organization. I also conducted interviews with 150
households across Yerevan, the capital city, and did in-depth interviews with other
activists, right-wing nationalists and journalists. Through psychoanalytic frameworks, as
well as studies of kinship, I show how sovereignty – the longed for dream for Armenians
over the last century – is felt to have failed because of the moral corruption of the
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illegitimate figures that fill Armenian seats of authority. I, thus, examine the ways in
which a missing father of the household is discursively linked to the lack of strong
leadership by a corrupt government, producing a prevalent feeling of moral disintegration
that nationalists displace onto the “homosexual.”
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Table of Contents

List of Figure

Acknowledgements

Prologue: Armenianness

Introduction: Survival of a Perverse Nation

Chapter 1. Queer Life: Invisible Visibility, Visible Invisibility and the Coding of
Everyday Life

*****

Part I. Perversion (Aylandakutyun)

Chapter 2. Wandering Yerevan: Nostalgia and Post-Hope in a Presentless and Empty
City of Ruins

Chapter 3. The Names of Illegitimate Fathers and the Ends of Symbolic Authority

Part II. Perversion (Aylaserutyun)

Chapter 4. The Figure of the Homosexual: Fetish, Freedom, and Separation

Chapter 5. Kintimate Encounters: The Nation-Family and Practices of Intimacy

Chapter 6. Perversion and Gender

*****
Chapter 7. No Father, No Future? The Politics of “No!” as Negation and Affirmation

Conclusion: Concluding and Moving Forward in a Brave New World of Disorder

Appendix

Works Cited

Biography
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List of Figure

Figure 1. Rosa’s building. Photograph by Author
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Acknowledgements

Writing something this large demands activity that begins not on the first day of
graduate school, or even undergraduate training, but way before then. For this, there is no
particular order or start that is better than any other to take a moment to acknowledge all
of the events and people who made this work possible. Beginning in my “youth,”
however, will have to suffice. The kind of intellectual curiosity that has shaped this work
surrounded me then. For this, I thank my network of extended family and friends for
building the kind of community around which ideas, thoughts and imagination could
flow. I thank the adults who gathered to drink whiskey, vodka and wine. While you
discussed the stuff that makes life worth enjoying in the backyard of the house on
Crenshaw Ave., Los Angeles and the old house in Malibu – you created possibilities of
curiosity and imaginative will. Special gratitude is owed to Sarkis Kalashian and Aghavni
Jouharian Williams. Growing up with you in these spaces and places gave meaning to my
own interior life-world. We not only grew up together, but we raised each other as able to
enjoy the chaotic streams of thought that surrounded us like ether.
It was in this environment, unbeknownst to me at the time, that I became
interpellated as Armenian. I became interested in Armenianness not as a historical site,
but as a set of practices involved in reflective and reflexive thought on cultural
productions that were not like any other. I was very aware, in other words, that I was
growing up in a different social context. Or, it felt different. And I treasured it. I was
surrounded by Armenian artists, musicians, intellectuals and those who generally
experienced conversation and other forms of relational exchange as rapture. I would like
to thank my father, Moses Shirinian, who was surprised when I first told him in Spring
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2010 that I would be going to Armenia to conduct research. “What?!” you asked “What
are you doing going there?!” Well, it shouldn’t be such a surprise that I wanted to go
there. “There” was a nostalgic place for me, filled with post-memory, to which I wanted
to one day (re)turn. But I did not know it at that time. I thank you now, as a grown-up
who has the privilege of sharing and learning with you, for giving me that Armenia. And,
I thank you for your support – all kinds of support – but, especially the kind that came
with constant argument-making.
To my mother, Aida Mouradian Shirinian – the pianist - it was you who taught me
how to feel and experience in ways that take you away, break you away, from reality.
Feeling, I saw in you, can make you face what you may not want to, but it can also be
fugue, allowing experience on other realms, other worlds. Thank you for all of your
support – material, affective, labor-intensive love – through the years and for believing
that I am who I want to be.
To my sister, Sose, even if younger than me and even if the teasing relation we
had in our youth may have led you to believe I know better, I am always learning
inquisitiveness and courageous posing of questions (and acting on them!) from you. I
know you know what I mean and the many layer-upon-layer jokes over the years have
allowed me to tap in to long-standing relation and the ability to come back to moments to
treasure them again…and again, and again.
When I arrived to UC Berkeley for undergraduate education, I was ready and
unable to wait to add academic language to these long-established longings for
intellectual production. Thank you, Paola Bacchetta, for my first Gender and Women’s
Studies course, from which there was no return, and teaching me forms of theory-making
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that broke with other, more traditional, binds. Thank you Roshanak Kheshti for
introducing me to the worlds that theory can make. And, Mel Chen, thank you for making
me feel the necessity in thinking about melancholy and the joy of writing that pushed me
to go to graduate school.
I would also like to acknowledge my graduate school cohort in Cultural
Anthropology with whom and from whom I learned: Yasmin Cho, Layla Brown, and,
finally Cagri Yoltar. Cagri, my colleague and friend, without you, graduate school would
have been an entirely different, and much less joyous, experience. Thank you for all of
the trips to Turkey and Kurdistan, for late night conversations, daytime conversations, as
well as the sometimes much needed silence. I would also like to thank Yektan
Turkylimaz for the music and for your patience in (re)teaching me to read in Armenian.
Without my teachers at Duke, who pushed my reading and writing in new
directions, I would not have been able to produce this massive object called a
dissertation. Thanks go to Anne Allison, Tina Campt, Frederic Jameson, Ranjana
Khanna, Anna Krylova, Ralph Litzinger, Anne-Maria Makhulu, Tomas Matza, Diane M.
Nelson, Jocelyn Olcott, Charles Piot, Kathy Rudy, Irene Silverblatt, Orin Starn, Rebecca
Stein, Antonio Viego, Robyn Wiegman, and Ara Wilson. The space of the classroom as a
site of sharing and collaboration seemed especially necessary for me when I returned
from year-long fieldwork in Armenia in Fall 2013 and the Cultural Anthropology
Dissertation Writing Workshop fulfilled that need. For this, I would like to thank my
fellow-dissertators for sharing their work-in-progress and for engaging with my own
work and providing feedback: Lorien Olive, Jatin Dua, Samuel Shearer, Patrick
Galbraith, Jennifer Bowles, Yasmin Cho, Layla Brown and Cagri Yoltar. I am also very
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