The Figure of the Homosexual

This chapter explores the production and cultivation of the rhetoric of aylaserutyun (sexual perversion). The author draws on a 2013 sex panic about gender and perverse futures as imagined and projected onto the figure of the homosexual. Through interviews with journalists, right-wing nationalists, and three members of households surveyed across Yerevan who pointed to homosexuality as a problem for the nation, the author also shows how the figure of sexual perversion (the homosexual) emerged as a displacement for other political-economic crises. As a figure imagined to be unproductive and unreproductive, the homosexual stood as the subject/object of the perceived impossibilities of national reproduction—as a condensation of widespread concerns about labor migration, mass emigration, and low fertility rates. This highlights how political-economic perversions, deviations, and violations are sexual in nature and how feelings about sexuality and sexual morality are Inextricable from material conditions and demands.