Experience-sharing as feminist praxis: Imagining a future of collective care

ABSTRACT

What kinds of political possibilities can be created in the face of postsocialist precarity at the intersection of socialist inheritance and violence accelerated under militarist and neoliberal governance in Armenia? This is the question I grapple with in this paper by drawing on in-depth interviews with politically active feminists. Taking a cue from my interlocutors, I question the dominant definition of the terms ‘activism’ and ‘activist’ – labels that in the Armenian context become ascribed to select groups of people as a means of discrediting and dismissing their political efforts. I focus on the slow and creative experience-sharing work that oriented toward collective care cultivates political consciousness to imagine a more livable life.

KEYWORDS:

• Experience-sharing
• postsocialist feminist praxis
• political imagination
• collective care
• Armenia

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editorial team at History and Anthropology as well as the anonymous reviewers for their generous and intellectually invigorating feedback that allowed me to deepen my engagement with the ideas that I was working through. I am profoundly grateful to Anna Shahnazaryan for such a life affirming collaboration, the enriching and insightful conversations that we have shared over delicious vegetarian meals, in cafes, on walks, in parks, at riverbanks in Armenia, or over Skype transcontinentally, but most importantly for our lifelong friendship, and her unwavering belief in human potential for goodness. I am deeply grateful to all my interlocutors who shared their experiences and practices with me, supported me with their solidarity, and invited me (or accepted my invitation) to collaborate on different projects. #InSolidarityTowardCollectiveCare.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In all the co-created fairy tales that a group of Armenian feminists co-created with children of different ages, the parts that children have created are marked with a different colour. In my translation of the text, I have marked the young author's text with purple. Here I use ‘they’ as a third person singular pronoun to capture the indeterminacy of the Armenian third person singular pronoun.

2 My colleague Anna Shahanzaryan, a feminist environmental activist, and I collected the larger corpus of data, on which I am drawing in this article. We conducted in-depth interviews with 26 people who had participated in most (or all) of the civic and environmental initiatives of the past 6–7 years in Armenia. In this text, however, I am engaging people who have been involved in experience-sharing as prefigurative feminist politics, whom I interviewed before Anna joined me.

3 In 2015, the then president Sargsyan's regime imposed a referendum on constitutional changes to turn Armenia from a presidential to the parliamentary republic and made the referendum pass through fraud widely documented by observers and calmly ignored by the regime. Sargsyan, who had already served as president of Armenia for two consecutive five-year terms from 2008 to 2018 (maximum allowable by the previous constitution), was said to have imposed the constitutional changes to prolong his tenure as the executive head of the country. During Sargsyan's tenure as president Armenia's public debt dramatically increased. According to World Bank (WB), as of 2016, 29.4% of Armenia's population was below the poverty line (World Bank Group 2018).

4 I put ‘velvet revolution’ and ‘revolution of love and solidarity’ in quotation marks because while the corrupt regime running Armenia for decades was toppled, the ‘velvet revolution’ did not bring transformation of violence. And different forms of violence still order the everyday through violence against LGBTI and queer people, and dismissal of queer and feminist politics on all sides of the mainstream political spectrum.

5 Fischer uses Keane's definition of civil society: ‘non-legislative, extra-judicial, public space in which societal differences, social problems, public policy, government action, and matters of community and cultural identity are developed and debated’ (Keane 1998, 45).

6 The autonomous Republic of Nagorno Karabakh with majority Armenian population and historically an Armenian province was annexed to Soviet Azerbaijan by Stalin's Decree in 1921.

7 The war came on the heels of the 1988 earthquake in Armenia claiming over 25,000 lives, leaving thousands without shelter. Out of its four immediate neighbors – Georgia in the north, Iran in the south, Azerbaijan on the east, and Turkey on the west – postsocialist Armenia still has closed borders and no diplomatic relations with Azerbaijan and Turkey over the unresolved issue of Nagorno Karabakh. Armenia has developed political and economic relations with Iran, often curtailed by Russia, which has had a heavy neo-imperial influence on the Armenian government. Armenia and Georgia have claimed good-neighborly relationships. Georgia provides Armenia land and sea access to Europe.

8 For sake of comparison I should say that before the collapse my father's monthly salary, as a civil engineer, was 240 roubles. Also, one could not in 1990s and cannot now buy anything for less than 10 drams (for which you can perhaps buy a stick of gum).

9 Often NGOs are funded by agencies, which are affiliated to governments of other countries. Take for example USAID, which is a US ‘congressional appropriation (Mandel 2002, 285).

10 ‘National Security Service posts footage of search in Manvel Grigoryan's house in Artsakh.’ News.am. June 25, 2018. Accessed on June 26, 2018. https://news.am/eng/news/458520.html

11 During the Electric Yerevan thousands of (mostly young) protestors from a wide range of political backgrounds blocked a key avenue in central Yerevan for two weeks in 2015. This was the most-peopled street action before the ‘velvet revolution’ of April–May of 2018.

12 Here I use the gender-neutral pronoun they, the pronoun in English Tzov uses to self-identify.

13 Downtown Yerevan is most desirable and associated with higher social status, read a configuration of class that pulls together a socialist and postsocialist assemblages of higher education and high property prices; Bangladesh is a less desirable suburb, associated with lower social status, to name a couple. The pun on Bangladesh is of course ironic given how it points not only to the internalization of discourses of British colonization on ranking countries that were former colonies but is also symptomatic of the way the ethnonationalist project in Armenia operates by reproducing these hierarchies.

14 See Arpi Balyan and Haniel Cass. ‘I speak to you, you don't listen.’ November 22, 2017. Accessed on September 2, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPvk6HJmgzE.

Additional information

Funding

I am grateful for the funding I have received from Marlboro College in Vermont as well as the University of Southern California Institute of Armenian Studies, supported in part by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.