1  Queer Life-Worlds in Postsocialist Armenia: Alternativ Space and the Possibilities of In/Visibility Tamar Shirinian Copyright © 2018 Michigan State University. Tamar Shirinian, “Queer Life-Worlds in Postsocialist Armenia: Alternativ Space and the Possibilities of In/Visibility,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmak- ing 5.1 (2018): 1–23. ISSN 2327-1574. All rights reserved. abstract Based on ifteen months of ethnographic research conducted between 2010 and 2013, this article explores queer life-worlds through the Armenian notion of alterna- tiv space, spaces that create possibilities for practices, desires, ways of looking, and being that difer 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 diference from what is considered proper diicult. As such, in/visible spaces in which these diferences 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 diference possible, they also reproduce the nation’s norms by containing that diference in interior queer life-worlds. I suggest, however, that these spaces also have the potential of redeining Armenianness as they bring alter- ity into the larger space of nation, queering Armenian futurity in ways that LGBT visibility would not make possible. In June 2010, I arrived in Yerevan, the capital of the Republic of Armenia. It was my irst time setting foot in what many Armenians back in the United States understand as the hayrenik, the fatherland. For me, “fatherland” was also literal, because Armenia was where my father had been born and raised. I had come to This content downloaded from 152.3.102.254 on Tue, 10 Jul 2018 05:27:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms