"We Don't Have a Daddy!": Marking Armenia's 2018 "Velvet Revolution" as a Site of Contesting Patriarchy

Abstract:In this article, I investigate a feminist action–the "Serzh is not our daddy!" action–that took place during the liminal time-space of Armenia's 2018 "Velvet Revolution." Recognizing authoritarian governance as a problem of patriarchy, feminist activists, as part of a makeshift group known as Aghchiknots (Girl's Place), organized an action where they contested not only the legitimacy of Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan, the object of refutation of the larger "Velvet Revolution," but the very problem of patriarchal centralization of authority, including that of the opposition Nikol Pashinyan who led the decentralized (apakentronacvac) protests in 2018. The action, as a public event, enabled a multiplicity of meanings, including the potentiality of fatherlessness as an ontological site from which to refuse authority centralized in patriarchal hands. In discussion with more recent feminist theory that has taken patriarchy seriously without losing the important resonances of race and class, this article contributes to how we might imagine patriarchy as an ongoing problem within authoritarian regimes as sites of public intimacy as well as everyday intimate life worlds and how an otherwise masculinist and patriarchal popular movement opens spaces from which to contest patriarchy.