Discursive Presence through Group Anonymity: Ethnonational Belonging, Gender, Sexuality, and Activism in the Republic of Armenia

Abstract

The current post-Soviet Republic of Armenia (RA) government is deeply entrenched in the crippling consequences of neoliberal economic processes its predecessors and current members unleashed. The RA has no diplomatic relations with two of its neighbors, Turkey and Azerbaijan, and finds itself at an intersection of various geopolitical interests of powerful actors, such as the European Union and Russia. Public officials and media manipulate these circumstances to package ethnonational belonging in neotraditionalist terms, which always hinges on heteropatriarchy and ethnic absolutism, among other things. This article suggests that through its queering activism around normative ideologies, a women's group, called Queering Yerevan Collective, creates a vital feminist formation that challenges these dominant, if corrupt, narratives of belonging. The feminist formation of the Collective is informed by multiscale intellectual and artistic decolonization of gendered individual and collective Soviet and post-Soviet experiences and knowledge, as well as the social and civic spaces and transnational feminist theoretical approaches they engage. This project of queering is a radicalizing effort, bringing a microlevel social change that the Collective makes possible by engendering new knowledge and activist tools through these decolonized (re)conceptualizations of past and present sociopolitical realities.