When: Friday, February 13, 11 am-12:30 pm

Where: Hybrid | UCLA Center for the Study of Women| Barbra Streisand Center, 1500 Public Affairs Building

Based on Dr. Tamar Shirinian’s recent book, Survival of a Perverse Nation: Morality and Queer Possibility in Armenia (Duke University Press, 2024), this talk will introduce the audience to two perverse figures: the homosexual and the oligarch.

Both figured prominently in national anxieties in the 2010s in Armenia as dangerous to the nation and its survival, and formed particular rhetorics of the nation’s perversion toward annihilation. Focusing on these two figures, the talk reflects upon neoliberalization’s threats against social reproduction by examining the moralization of political-economic processes and asks what a queer theory of political economy offers to the critique of late capitalism.