Published in 2018 on escholarship.org, A Life of Otherness: Identity Negotiation, Family Relations, and Community Experiences among LGBQ Armenians in Los Angeles by Rosie Vartyter Aroush is a first of its kind dissertation that researches, “the struggles endured and strategies employed by Los Angeles lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) Armenians in negotiating and reconciling their multiple identities by constantly privileging then covering one over the other.”
Rosie Vartyter Aroush has a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she emphasized in Armenian Studies with a concentration in Gender & Sexuality Studies. As a pioneer in bridging LGBTQ and Armenian studies, her research eliminates the current gap between the two disciplines and promotes the growing body of knowledge in Gender & Sexuality Studies by adding Armenian to the representation of groups studied within the field.
This dissertation [offers] a new discourse when approaching Armenian sociological research with the inclusion of underlying gender and sexuality themes. It highlights both the unique and parallel features of the LGBQ Armenian context for research among similar ethnic and diasporic groups.
From the Introduction
Featuring interviews with LGBQ Armenians, Aroush’s dissertation provides a key insight into the lives of Queer Armenians, but also reinforces, from an academic perspective, what Queer Armenian poets, novelists, essayists, memoirists, filmmakers, and artists have argued in their own work.
“LGBQ Armenians were in a constant state of resisting absolute prioritizing one over the other, while simultaneously covering and gender conforming in Armenian spaces […] LGBQ Armenians struggle with both the collectivistic shame culture and sexual shame. These issues are reinterpreted in the process of negotiating and strategizing to reconcile their ethnic and sexual identities and therefore re-construct a new sense of Armenian identity, as a result, Othering the mainstream.”
You can read A Life of Otherness through escholarship.org
