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The Figure of the Homosexual: Masculinity in and between Biopolitical and Traumatic Spatiotemporal Frames in Postsocialist Armenia
Abstract
In 2012, through a sex panic brought on by right-wing nationalists in Armenia, the figure of the homosexual came to occupy an important space within Armenian national anxieties. This figure does not necessarily correspond to any real LGBTQ+ experience, but is rather one configured through biopolitical frames, especially through anxieties about demographic crises like mass emigration, a declining fertility rate, and an increase in female feticide through sex selective abortions. While not exclusively masculine, the figure of the homosexual predominantly haunts imaginaries of masculinity in Armenia’s present and future. Within public imaginaries – especially through popular and right-wing media – this figure’s propensity for non-reproductive futurity, his disturbance of the boundaries between gender roles, and his production of ideas and possibilities that rupture understandings of a proper Armenianness place the survival of the nation into crisis. In this way, the figure of the homosexual has become one aligned with other figures of perpetration of violence against Armenia, such as the Turk and the Azeri, bringing various existing threads of national anxieties concerning social and biological reproduction in the future into one crisis. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted amongst LGBT activists as well as right-wing anti-homosexual activists in Armenia from 2012-2013. I explore the figure of the homosexual as a part of a larger proliferation of figures of threat through an analysis of the traumatic national spatiotemporality of the nation, where present anxieties become condensed with past national traumas and fantasies about national annihilation in the future. I argue that the ways in which postsocialist political, economic, and social crises are condensed with other crises – such as genocide and war – have led to the emergence of this hypermediatized figure and that in this context of crisis and national traumatic spatiotemporality, the figure makes possible displacement of attention from political and economic problems in the nation-state, marking what are political economic crises as ones about crises in proper masculinity.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Armenia
Sub Area
Queer/LGBT Studies