Join the Commission for LGBT People and the Pride Center for the second entry in our spring lectures series, "What Homophobia in Post-Soviet Armenia might Teach Us About Homophobia in the U.S. South" from Dr. Tamar Shirinian (she/hers).

Lecture description from Dr. Shirinian: Since the end of state socialism in the Post-Soviet Republic of Armenia, there has been a lot of contention regarding sexuality. In 2012, a major sex panic took place as right-wing nationalists claimed that homosexuality - dubbed sexual perversion - was spreading in the country and that it was dangerous as it would leave families in ruins and eventually mean the annihilation of the nation. Research I conducted, however, shows that families in the capital city of Yerevan did feel that the nation was threatened and that families were being left in ruins. The threat was not homosexuality, however, but the moral perversions of the political economic elite who had made life, its livability, and its reproducibility feel impossible. In this talk, I show how public concerns about sexuality are intricately related to problems in production and social reproduction and that in order to fully deal with right-wing panics about gender and sexuality, which we see on the rise in the U.S. at this moment as well, we have to think about questions of political economy.