ABSTRACT
Through a close reading of Arlene Avakian’s Lion Woman’s Legacy (1992) and Nancy Agabian’s Me As Her Again (2008), the only two bildungsroman memoirs published by queer women in the Armenian transnation, this essay explores the stakes of the oppositional constructs of queer sexuality and heteronormative, nationalist Armenian identity—and how genocide might play a key and disruptive role in their articulations. Striving to find place in exile as “queers” who self-identify on the LGBTQ spectrum, both authors explore the exclusionary effects of nationalism and provide an optics for how subjects of marginalized gender and sexual identities might reorient their subjectivities and senses of belonging within and without the hegemonic nationalist frame. Locating queer identity within and as a result of their Armenian diasporic homespaces, I argue that the memoirs are subversive contributions to transnational Armenian literary production. (Re)presenting feminist, queer identity and the diasporic Armenian-American experience as inextricably bound, they provide a grounds for Armenian identity to be imaginatively contested and transformed.
