New Book Examines Culture and Politics in Armenia
When Tamar Shirinian prepared to visit Armenia in 2012 her research was focused on activism, but events in the post-Soviet republic starting that year led to a closer look at politics.
Over more than a decade and multiple trips to the country, she developed a new view of multiple forces at work. Now an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, her first book was released in late 2024, Survival of a Perverse Nation: Morality and Queer Possibility in Armenia.
“My original project was asking questions about LGBTQ activism and feminism in a country that I already understood was largely not feminist and pretty homophobic,” said Shirinian.
Few Armenians had publicly discussed their sexual orientation, but soon she saw what she described as a “homosexual panic,” with the topic being discussed on mainstream media and social networks as a threat to families.
She sees anxiety about the survival of the nation—which suffered a genocide under rule in the early 20th century—tied to two rhetorics of perversion, one sexual and one moral.
“In the book, I trace the ways in which this new language of sexual perversion was making claims about the family as being so important to Armenia and homosexuality was going to destroy the family,” she said. “Anti-gender activists started to emerge, claiming that the very concept of gender was destroying the nation.”
Yet among 150 interviews Shirinian conducted in the capital city of Yerevan, only three people brought up the topic of homosexuality.
“Almost everyone brought up the moral perversion surrounding the oligarchy in Armenia,” she said. “They’re actually the ones who are threatening the family, family values, systems of care, and so all of those anxieties are being displaced onto homosexuality.”
In the last chapter of the book, she connects what’s happening in Armenia to the larger world and the rise of what she calls “daddy politics,” the reliance on a central, authoritarian figure to look over the country.
During Armenia’s Velvet Revolution in 2018, which led to the downfall of Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan, feminists participating in the protests also objected to replacing him with another patriarchal figure.
“One morning, during this mass social movement, young women gathered, and they marched down the streets yelling a chant, ‘Serzh is not our daddy. We don’t have a daddy,’” Shirinian said. “I saw this moment as incredibly inspiring in the sense that what they were saying was not just that we want a new regime. In fact, they were saying we don’t want any kind of patriarchal regime.”
She also looks at the rise of authoritarianism across the globe over recent decades and points to common tendencies, a view that they are saving their nation through strength or aggression and targeting perceived enemies such as immigrants.
“We also see a collapsing economic infrastructure that could actually provide what people need to survive,” Shirinian said. “Part of the strength is being strong enough to cut budgets, being strong enough to deal with poor people starving to death, or being homeless, or all of these things.”
As Shirinian continues her research, she’s looking at how free market policies have shaped the social fabrics in countries such as Armenia in the post-Soviet era. She’s also interviewing Armenians about what they imagined would happen decades ago when they called for independence from the Soviet Union.
Shirinian also just launched a biweekly podcast on YouTube called “Other Armenias,” with Milena Abrahamyan, a feminist based in Armenia.
By Amy Beth Miller