Survival of a Perverse Nation

“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

"Learned, provocative, and in some ways groundbreaking, this book will matter to students studying post-Soviet elites and their lingering domination of the societies whose fabric they have damaged grievously. Equally, it is an inspiring and often persuasive analysis of forms of resistance to societies that represent resistance as sexually deviant, queer, or feminist. Highly recommended." - K. Tölölyan, Choice

"Unlike many ethnographies that I know in the vein of postsocialist research, this is a special one. It gives us a window not only into words and actions of people, but also into the fantasies of the people who were interviewed." - Bogdan Popa, Slavic Review