Episode 34! The Genocide and Embodied Archives w/Elyse Semerdjian

We talk to Dr. Elyse Semerdjian about her book Remnants and her readings of alternative, embodied archives. These archives include tattoos on women's bodies; experiences and narratives of sexual assault, kidnappings and marriages to other communities as well as the rescue missions and their effects on the rescued; the ways in which women's bodies represented genocide survival and victimization; and the meanings of bones scattered across the desert. We get into critical questions of what it means for women to have to do the labor of (re)inventing Armenianness after the events of the genocide and the trauma that those experiences must have meant in and of themselves.