Queer Life-Worlds in Postsocialist Armenia: Alternativ Space and the Possibilities of In/Visibility

Based on fifteen months of ethnographic research conducted between 2010 and 2013, this article explores queer life-worlds through the Armenian notion of alternativ space, spaces that create possibilities for practices, desires, ways of looking, and being that differ from Armenian national values of propriety. Political-economic reform has created anxieties regarding national propriety and the family's ability to exist in continuity with a moral past within postsocialist time-space. Intense anxieties regarding the proper social reproduction of national propriety make visible forms of difference from what is considered proper difficult. As such, in/visible spaces in which these differences can be exhibited have emerged, merging nonnormative sexual and gendered worlds with wider experiences of alterity that disturb the nation's social reproduction and continuity with the past. Although alternativ spaces make difference possible, they also reproduce the nation's norms by containing that difference in interior queer life-worlds. I suggest, however, that these spaces also have the potential of redefining Armenianness as they bring alterity into the larger space of nation, queering Armenian futurity in ways that LGBT visibility would not make possible.