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Grounded in original accounts of queer lives under authoritarian rule in Azerbaijan, this book introduces the concept of petro-authoritarian violence to show how oil wealth, state power and the regulation of gender and sexuality intersect to shape the marginalisation, control and conditional inclusion of queers. Drawing on ethnography, it traces how queer people navigate political homophobia, nationalism, militarism and NGO donor politics, while also foregrounding everyday practices of conflict, survival, solidarity and resistance. By focusing on local categories and experiences, the book contributes to queer anthropology by rethinking dominant frameworks from the post-Soviet context and highlighting how queer life persists under conditions of constraint and ambiguities.
"This book’s premise and topics are of extreme importance to scholarship in queer anthropology, queer theory, nationalism, post socialism, and the studies of the state...no book yet exists on queer experience, violence against queer existence, or on queer readings of the state in Azerbaijan." — Tamar Shirinian, University of Tennessee
Ramil Zamanov is a queer ethnographer with a Humboldt Research Fellowship at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Free University of Berlin for the project ‘Enforced Mobility in Authoritarian Regimes: Queer Immigration from Azerbaijan to Spain’, from 2026 to 2028. In 2025, they were elected to the Board of ATGENDER, the leading European network for feminist research, education, and documentation.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Note on the Text
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter 1. Excavating Silence: Qiy Histories and State Narratives in Azerbaijan
Chapter 2. Mentalitet and Marginalization: How Qiys Perceive the State’s Anti-‘Petux’ Propaganda
Chapter 3. ‘Homo-nationalist Attempts’: The Second Nagorno Karabakh War, Şəhid and Promises of Inclusion
Chapter 4. Authoritarian Intimacies: How Petro-Authoritarian Violence Organises Qiy Divisions in Azerbaijan
Chapter 5. Building Qiy Solidarity: Hopes, Dreams, and the Resource Maintenance in an Authoritarian State
Conclusion. Possibilities of Qiy Futures
Post-Script. Continuities and Ruptures
References
Index