Overview

In Survival of a Perverse Nation, Tamar R. Shirinian traces two widespread rhetorics of perversion—sexual and moral—in postsocialist Armenia, showing how they are tied to anxieties about the nation’s survival. 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. Shirinian shows how both figures threaten the nation’s proper social reproduction, a source of great anxiety for a nation whose primary point of identity is surviving genocide. 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. Detailing how the language of perversion offers trenchant critiques of capitalism as a perversion of life, Shirinian presents a new queer theory of political economy.

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9781478031116

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Reviews

“In this evocative and provocative work Tamar Shirinian uses the lens of perversion to generate a queer theory of political economy that considers the radical potential for world-building that moves away from political patriarchy. Despite how deeply neoliberal capitalism has permeated our daily lives and how intractable it seems, reading Survival of a Perverse Nation left me feeling inspired and optimistic. The actions of thinking and creative alternative worlds appear at every scale in this book, making for a truly enjoyable read.” -- Emily Channell-Justice, author of * Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine * “With rich ethnographic research, Tamar Shirinian develops a queer theory of political economy that explains how moral anxieties regarding national survival are inextricably tied to capitalism’s disturbances and violations. Survival of a Perverse Nation is an outstandingly intelligent critique of the mythohistory of Armenia’s survival and the state’s configuration of perverse sex in the social reproduction of the body politics.” -- Petrus Liu, author of * The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus *

Author Information

Tamar R. Shirinian is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee.

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