By Khachig Tololyan
(Source: Ararat Magazine (Autumn, 198 8):8O)
As feminist literary criticism has
developed over the past two decades, it has made readers aware of the extent to
which the forms of woman’s desire are not natural and unchanging givens, but
rather are constructed differently in every society. This shaping of desire is
achieved by the combined force of social relations (for example the
institutions of courtship and marriage) and verbal representations (for
example, fictions which depict and evaluate various manifestations of desire).
Much of Armenian fiction and criticism,
like Armenian society itself, remains slow to acknowledge and explore feminine
desire. Indeed, even male desire, a less taboo topic, is actually rarely
rendered directly; its occasional representations remain highly
conventionalization have affected two dominant misconception which persist in
all but a fraction of the considerable output of critical essays and commentary
which Soviet Armenia and the Diaspora produce. The first is the conclusion that
the massive problems created by the trauma of genocide and the urgencies of
maintaining collective identity rightly overshadow the problems of sexuality
and the construction of gendered subjectivity, both in the real world and in
narrative. This view follows in part from an Armenian conception of narrative art,
which demands that it contribute to the fulfillment of the social agenda. The
second misconception is expressed by the degree to which the problematic status
of desire, when recognized, is framed by the concept of intermarriage, by the
act that brings the odar, the
stranger, the seductive other into the bosom of the Armenian family. In other
words, when it is acknowledged to exist, desire is conceptualized as one of
those problems threatening the nation; it is displaced and misrecognized as an
aspect of the problem of assimilation.
