Published in 2024, Survival of a Perverse Nation: Morality and Queer Possibility in Armenia is an academic exploration of how the Republic of Armenia explores its existential crises through narratives of the “figure of the homosexual” and the Republic’s oligarchs.
Tamar S. Shirinian is an Assistant Professor in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her work focuses on queer theory and studies, transnational feminisms, political economy, the processes of post-socialism.
In her fieldwork with Armenians, Shirinian found that right-wing nationalists’ focus on sexual perversion centers the figure of the homosexual, while questions of moral perversion surround oligarchs and other members of the political economic elite. While the homosexual is seen as non- or improperly reproductive, the oligarch’s moral deviations from the caring and paternalistic expectations associated with national leadership also endanger Armenia’s survival. […] In the existential threat posed by these forms of perversion Shirinian finds paths where nonsurvival might mean the creation of futures that are queerer and more just.
From the book description
Additionally, here is a PDF copy of Sovereignty As a Structure of Feeling: The Homosexual within Post-Cold War Armenian Geopolitics
Published in 2018, Sovereignty As a Structure of Feeling: The Homosexual within Post-Cold War Armenian Geopolitics is an academic article, in which Shrinian argues, “in the post-Cold War era, it is through conspiracy theories regarding figures like the homosexual and its threats on “cultural values,” that sovereignty is felt, negotiated and contested. These understandings of sovereignty emerge in the absence of official or transparent state positions, which has new implications on postcoloniality.”
The article was published in Lambda Nordica’s Postcolonial Queer Europe (Vol. 22 No. 2-3). You can also read the article online.
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ISBN electronic: 9781478060109. Published by Duke University Press.
