The Homosexual and the Oligarch: Perverse Figurations and Social Reproduction

Based on Dr. Tamar Shirinian’s recent book, Survival of a Perverse Nation: Morality and Queer Possibility in Armenia (Duke University Press, 2024), this talk will introduce the audience to two perverse figures: the homosexual and the oligarch.

Both figured prominently in national anxieties in the 2010s in Armenia as dangerous to the nation and its survival, and formed particular rhetorics of the nation's perversion toward annihilation. Focusing on these two figures, the talk reflects upon neoliberalization's threats against social reproduction by examining the moralization of political-economic processes and asks what a queer theory of political economy offers to the critique of late capitalism.

Tamar R. Shirinian is a cultural anthropologist whose work explores themes of gender, sexuality, and political economy and especially their interconnectedness in the postsocialist world, focused particularly on the Republic of Armenia. Tamar's first book, Survival of a Perverse Nation: Morality and Queer Possibility in Armenia, which explores homosexual panic and its ties to post-Soviet crises in social reproduction, was published by Duke University Press in 2024 and won the 2025 Ruth Benedict Award for Outstanding Monograph from the Association for Queer Anthropology. She is currently working on a second book manuscript, tentatively entitled Yakhq and Other Feminisms from the Post-Second World, which investigates post-Soviet ideologies and practices of feminism as well as their tensions with one another. Tamar was the co-editor of the 2018 Armenian Review special issue entitled "Queering Armenian Studies," is the editor of the forthcoming volume Toward a Political Economy of Intimate Life: Social Reproduction Revisited (Emerald, 2026), is working on a co-edited volume entitled It is Possible to Cry for the Whole World: Reflections on Armenian Feminist Solidarities (Wayne State University Press), and has published numerous articles in journals such as Feminist Formations, American Ethnologist, Gender & Society, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and Anthropology and Humanism amongst others. Additionally, she is the co-editor of the "Third Space" section of the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, a member of the 61 Collective in Armenia, and the co-host of the Other Armenias Podcast (available on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts, except Spotify).

Sponsor(s): Center for European and Russian Studies, Center for Near Eastern Studies, The Promise Armenian Institute, Department of Gender Studies, Center for the Study of Women, Department of Anthropology, Promise Chair in Armenian Music, Arts, and Culture