“Don't be our daddy”: Feminist labor on the political left in Armenia

Abstract

AbstractThe ongoing feminist struggle in post‐Soviet Armenia to imagine a world without patriarchal social arrangements, militarization, and capitalism is multidirectional, involving intimate relations at home, with fellow leftists, and in public political life. Instead of divesting from afforded systemic privileges, both material and representational, leftist men often extend patriarchal power relations to their political work, creating what I call civic patriarchy, an extension of patriarchal power relations leftist men‐comrades practice within feminine‐designated civic work. To the extent that leftist men are invested in patriarchal sociopolitical arrangements, they remain in stronger solidarity with those upholding the existing social order than with their leftist feminist comrades committed to upending it. Drawing on a collaborative project on leftist activism in Armenia today, I examine the work feminists do on the political left to resist their erasure as political actors and to orient the political consciousness of their leftist men‐comrades away from civic patriarchy and toward a more equitable collective life. I argue that a nonhierarchical politics of cultivating relationality that not only sustains our embodied lives in all their materiality but also attunes us to each other with collective life‐sustaining care is key to building broad feminist coalitions across differences.