Gender Democracy - Articles

We are glad to announce a call for contributions to a book project that seeks to reflect on masculinities in the South Caucasus through various angles, including personal, artistic, and scientific.

This analysis aims to reveal the socio-linguistic features that are conditioned by war. The text does not claim to be in-depth research, but rather aims to show what the connection is between war, language, gender identity, and what additional layers there are for studying this topic further.

Vusala Hajiyeva, a transgender woman from Baku, Azerbaijan, tells about the isolation, which did not start during the covid-19 pandemic. She shares her personal story describing the multifaceted difficulties that transgender people face in her country, both on an individual and systemic level. Vusala tells stories of failure, hatred, love, and hope.

Informality is a form of solidarity economy and post-pandemic survival mode for the most economically active population of Azerbaijan. Women, consisting 62% of the informal workers, should be situated in the center of conversations on reproduction, labor rights, social protection and welfare support during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article points out how the various consolidated apparatuses render feminism and feminists the most visible other by utilizing different othering techniques such as criminalization and securitization. What is more, it depicts how feminism and women's issues started to get politicized, shifting from the "social/safe" to the "political/dangerous" space on a discursive level.  

"There is a house in Baku where cis and trans women live together and support each other. They also don't allow any transphobic people or anyone who could potentially be a threat to move in," said a friend to me in a conversation that one usually has when you haven't seen each other in months and want to share the world over a cup of tea. 

The nanny profession can be described in many ways:  informal work, care work, and domestic work. Globally, women perform these jobs. Child care, like many jobs that women do, never acquired professional recognition and remains disrespected and degraded to this day.  

More than 50 people were injured in attacks on journalists and civil society in Tbilisi in early July in connection with Pride Week. The German Federal Government and the EU should strongly urge their Georgian partners to address the violence through prompt and comprehensive legal and political action. 

During and after the 44-day war in Nagorno Karabakh, numerous initiatives were launched to assist people displaced in Armenia. Women played a particularly active role in providing humanitarian aid. This was due not only to the fact that men were involved in the war, but also to the experience women had gained from the first Karabakh war (1992-1994). The photo story tells about some of these active and assisting women.

This article tells about the stories of women who moved to Armenia in the third Artsakh war and whose husbands stayed in the battlefield in Artsakh.