The illiberal east: the gender and sexuality of the imagined geography of Eurasia in Armenia

In this article, I investigate the ways in which Armenian right-wing nationalists understand the particularities of Armenian culture that stand apart from what they deem ‘Western values’, such as human rights and tolerance for homosexuality. Armenian right-wing nationalists place Armenia within an imaginary geography that I call the ‘Illiberal East,’ making up a part of a ‘Eurasian’ civilization. I discuss the debates in Yerevan surrounding the screening of the Serbian film Parada about the unfolding of a Gay Pride Parade in Sarajevo, claimed to be European propaganda unleashed onto Armenians. I then explore the notion of gender as a Western perversion with damaging consequences in the East through the right-wing nationalist condemnation of an event organized by a feminist organization as well as the National Assembly’s approval of the law protecting equal rights that included gender in its wording. Finally, I analyze a fairytale about Gender as a personified and destructive force. I show how the Illiberal East is imagined and invented. While the ‘West’ has been active in producing the ‘East’ as a backward region, the Illiberal East is an Eastern invention of a radically different civilization, or what we might understand as a self-Orientalizing narrative. While imaginary, the culture talk that informs the Illiberal East has real consequences, such as anti-homosexual discourses and often violence toward LGBT persons, and is rooted in geopolitical alliances, especially those led by Russia.