Title:  "The Figure of the Homosexual:  Right-Wing Nationalism, Sexual Perversion, and the Crisis in Social Reproduction"

In 2012-2014, a right-wing panic took hold of mainstream media and social networking sites in the post-Soviet Republic of Armenia. Within the rhetoric of this panic, homosexuals and the concept of "gender" were leading to the annihilation of the nation as it existed. These notions of national annihilation were expressed through the dangerous mechanism of "sexual perversion." It might be easy to dismiss some of the absurd narratives of these panics,f or instance that the homosexual and the concept of "gender" were leading to children no longer recognizing their parents as mother and father or to not know if they were themselves boys or girls and thus would lead to a failure in reproducing a next generation. In this talk I argue that a nuanced analysis of the elements of these panics reveals real, material underlying anxieties about social reproduction. I trace these narratives about the homosexual's destruction of Armenian society to contemporary panics regarding transgender persons in the U.S. to reveal a pattern of the intimate and moral dimensions of global economic crisis.