Feminism on the Margins: Social Movements and the ‘Woman Question’ in Postsocialist Armenia

Feminism on the Margins: Social Movements and the ‘Woman Question’ in Postsocialist Armenia

Although the postsocialist Republic of Armenia has seen many mass social movements and struggles over the last few decades, gender as a question – an issue, a critical unit of political analysis, or a site of major social and ideological change – has remained largely marginalized politically. This project aims to understand the paradox in which women have often taken up and continue to take up leadership and/or central positions within major social movements, but feminism continues to be marginalized: from the anti-chemical industry initiatives at Nairit facility in 1988 prompted by glasnost, the Independence and Karabagh movements of 1989-1991, the 2008 post-Presidential election movement, the various protests that have taken place in the spring/summers of 2013-2016, the Occupy Mashtots initiative, the 2018 “Velvet Revolution” that eventually ousted the Prime Minister Serj Sargsyan from power, as well as the contemporary ongoing anti-mining movement in Amulsar. Rather than critique, Feminism on the Margins poses this paradox as a question to leave open the possibility that there are particularities of a Second World feminism that might emerge if we do not assume that feminism in this region will and should look like feminisms that have emerged in other parts of the world. Through ongoing ethnographic, oral history, and archival research, this project returns to the old classical questions in feminist anthropology – what is feminism and who is a feminist? – placing these questions in relation to larger social movements, revolutions, social and environmental justice, and the building of a post-revolutionary state.