Anthropology

Shirinian, Tamar

Shirinian, Tamar

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Faculty

Tamar Shirinian

Assistant Professor | Cultural Anthropology

I am a cultural anthropologist who is interested in the relationships between gender, sexuality, nationalism, political-economy, and social reproduction and how these are experienced, imagined, and felt and especially in the postsocialist and post-Soviet world. My ethnographic research has been based in the Republic of Armenia since 2010, where I have studied LGBTQ and feminist organizations as well as grass roots initiatives, right-wing nationalist movements, and the links these formations have within geopolitics.

“In this evocative and provocative work Tamar R. 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 creating 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 R. 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 politic.”
— Petrus Liu, author of The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus.

My first book, Survival of a Perverse Nation: Morality and Queer Possibility in Armenia (Duke University Press, 2024) examines the widespread rhetorics of “perversion” that have emerged in response to postsocialist transformation in the Republic of Armenia. I argue that these rhetorics of perversion – regarding both sexuality as well as the problematic (im)morality of the political-economic elite – are tied to one another as they both express crisis regarding the nation’s social reproduction. The book combines rigorous ethnographic examination with probing theoretical analysis to maintain that transformations from socialism to postsocialism have been felt as a perversion of life. Survival of a Perverse Nation is a queer ethnography that intervenes within the very genre of queer ethnographies by taking up political and economic transformations as objects of queer inquiry rather than focusing in on LGBTQ+ identities and subcultures.

Read Article Documenting LGBTQ+ Experiences

I am currently working on a second book manuscript that explores feminism and feminist claims in the post-Soviet Republic of Armenia. This book situates itself both in the present – where feminism coincides with the politics of democratization, environmentalism, and anti-militarization – as well as the socialist feminist past of the country, interrogating the progress narrative at the heart of contemporary liberalisms in the “Second World,” or the parts of the world that were once under state socialism. The book takes on the framework of marginalization, showing how feminism as a political question has been marginalized in the political sphere while feminists themselves are central to many of the debates and struggles therein. Marginalization as a mechanism, however, also plays itself out within debates amongst feminists themselves as some threads of possibility (especially liberalism) marginalize other claims and other feminist actors. I argue that these forms of marginalization and the very tensions amongst feminisms and feminists in Armenia are based in unresolved erasures and silences of a socialist feminist past. The book aims to offer a “Second World” feminism that has its own nuanced intellectual genealogies, material contexts, assertions and debates which differ from “Western” (or liberal) feminism as well as Third World and post-colonial feminisms.

I am also currently working on a third project that makes use of oral histories to understand the political imaginaries of those who lived at the end of the Soviet era and through the independence movement. This project seeks to unearth how independent futures were imagined in order to feel out the possibilities of those future imaginaries of the past for today’s futures in the Republic of Armenia and beyond.

Currently, along with Lucia Sorbera, I am the co-editor of the “Third Space” section of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies.

Beyond these projects, I also have research experience (and future aspirations) in psychological and psychoanalytic anthropology, medical anthropology (especially in questions of access and health insurance in the U.S.), and the queer South (especially East Tennessee).

Tamar Shirinian on Digital Fakeness in Armenia: PoLAR Author Interview

Select Publications

[If you would like a copy of any of the publications listed below, please do not hesitate to ask!]

Book

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

  • Sargsyan, Nelli, Tamar Shirinian. 2024. “Life-Sustaining Transboundary Survival: Rethinking Armenian Struggles for Heritage.” International Journal of Heritage Studies. DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2024.2401806
  • Shirinian, Tamar. 2024. “Nightlife as Queer Political Method.” Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture vol 9 (2). https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2024/06/nightlife-queer-political-method/
  • Shirinian, Tamar. 2023. “Feminist Pedagogies on the Frontlines: Struggling Against a Mine, Struggling Against Patriarchy.” Gender and Society no 37(5): 727-749. DOI: 10.1177/08912432231185876
  • Shirinian, Tamar. 2023. “Toward a Queer Postnational Politics: Imagining the Nation Not Surviving.” Ab Imperio no 2023 (1): 59-75. DOI: 10.1353/imp.2023.0006
  • Shirinian, Tamar. 2022. “‘We Don’t Have a Daddy!’: Marking Armenia’s 2018 ‘Velvet Revolution’ as a Site of Contesting Patriarchy.” Feminist Formations no 34(2): 125-145. DOI: 10.1353/ff.2022.0025
  • Shirinian, Tamar. 2022. “To Foresee the Unforeseeable: LGBT and Feminist Civil Society and the Question of Feminine Space in Postsocialist Armenia.” In Is Female to Male as NGO is to State? edited by Andria Timmer and Elizabeth Wirtz, 240-263. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. ISBN: 9781800734616, 1800734611
  • Shirinian, Tamar. 2022. “Collective Study and the Possibilities of Becoming: Between a Feminist Space in Yerevan and the U.S.” In Queer Sharing in the Marketized University, edited by Churnjeet Mahn, Matt Brim, and Yvette Taylor, 63-78. New York: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9781003203254-6
  • Shirinian, Tamar. 2022. “Armenian Studies in Middle East Studies: Internationalism and Solidarity.” International Journal of Middle East Studies no 54(3): 589-593. DOI: 10.1017/S0020743822000769
  • Shirinian, Tamar. 2021. “Political Patriarchy: Gendered Hierarchies, Paternalism, and Public Space in Armenia’s ‘Velvet Revolution,’ in Armenia’s Velvet Revolution: Authoritarian Decline and Civil Resistance in a Multipolar World, edited by Laurence Broers and Anna Ohanyan, 181-200. London: I.B. Tauris. ISBN: 9781788317207, 1788317203
  • Shirinian, Tamar. 2021. “Post-War Specters: The Ghosts that Haunt Armenia in the Aftermath of the 2020 Nagorno-Karabagh War.” Caucasus Analytics Digest. March 2021 (No. 119): 9-15. DOI: 10.3929/ethz-b-000489488
  • Shirinian, Tamar. 2021. “The Illiberal East: The Gender and Sexuality of the Imagined Geography of Eurasia in Armenia.” Gender, Place and Culture: Journal for Feminist Geography no 28(7): 955-974. DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2020.1762545
  • Shirinian, Tamar. 2020. “Love and the Liminality of Revolution: Interpersonal Relations and Transformations In-Between the April-May Events in Armenia.” Anthropology and Humanism no 45 (2): 322-338. DOI: 10.1111/anhu.12303
  • Shirinian, Tamar. 2020. “Intimate Sovereigns: Political Fatherhood and the Limits of Power in Armenia.” Cultural Dynamics Special Issue: “Intimate Workings of Culture” 32(3): 213-229. DOI: 10.1177/09213740209206
  • Shirinian, Tamar. 2020. “Querying Identity: Misrecognition as Performative Refusal in Armenian LGBT Advocacy.” In Decolonizing Queer Experience and Performance: LGBT+ Narratives from Eastern Europe and Eurasia, edited by Emily Channell-Justice, 37-54. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. ISBN: 9781793630315, 1793630313
  • Shirinian, Tamar, Emily Channell-Justice. 2020. “Introduction: Of Constatives, Performatives, and Disidentifications: Decolonizing Queer Critique in Postsocialist Times.” In Decolonizing Queer Experience and Performance: LGBT+ Narratives from Eastern Europe and Eurasia, edited by Emily Channell-Justice, 1-14. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. ISBN: 9781793630315, 1793630313
  • Shirinian, Tamar. 2020. “Diasporas’ Queer Archives: Innovating Visions Through Gayatri Gopinath’s Theory and Method.” Diaspora, 21 (1):87-98. DOI: 10.3138/diaspora.21.1.2020-07-03
  • Shirinian, Tamar. 2019. “Fakeness: Digital Inauthenticity and Emergent Political Tactics in Armenia.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review no. 42 (2): 347-361. DOI: 10.1111/plar.12306
  • Shirinian, Tamar. 2019. “Gender Hysteria: The Other Effect of Public Policy in Armenia.” In Sexuality, Human Rights, and Public Policy, edited by Chima J. Korieh and Elizabeth O. Onogwu, 115-130. Lanham, Maryland: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ISBN: 9781683932345, 168393234X
  • Shirinian, Tamar, Mei-chun Lee. 2019. “Tamar Shirinian on Digital Fakeness in Armenia: PoLAR Author Interview.” In PoLAR: Journal of Political and Legal Anthropology, published virtually. Available from https://polarjournal.org/2019/12/17/tamar-shirinian-on-digital-fakeness-in-armenia-polar-author-interview/

    Selected Public Scholarship

    Education

    • B.A. (2007) Gender and Women’s Studies, University of California – Berkeley
      M.A. (2012) Cultural Anthropology, Duke University
      Ph.D. (2016) Cultural Anthropology, Duke University,
      Certificate in Feminist Studies (2016) Duke University


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