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Abstract
Using original oral history research conducted in 2019, this study documents the voices,
values, and priorities of feminists in the contemporary Republic of Armenia, revealing how
interviewees came to feminist consciousness and how they conceptualized feminism.
Interviewees articulated which feminist issues they believed to be most pressing in Armenia,
including domestic violence, misogyny and homophobia in the society and the church,
LGBTQIA rights, sexual education, and militarism. They expressed hopes and concerns
regarding the sequelae of the “Velvet Revolution” of 2018. Interviews were conducted with
twenty Armenian women diverse in age and occupation, all of whom self-identified as feminists
or were deeply involved in feminist activism. These interviews subvert nationalist claims that
feminism is intrinsically Western and antithetical to Armenian tradition, providing instead an
alternative narrative of Armenian feminism as emerging syncretically from indigenous cultural
elements and Western feminism. I theorize intersubjectivity between researcher and interviewee
when both are members of a transnation, a nation consisting of those living in the nation-state
and those living in permanent diaspora, arguing that there is a web of interconnectedness
between researcher and interviewees that complicates the usual insider/outsider oral history
relationship. The interview encounter shapes the feminism of both researcher and interviewee.