As part of its Gender Mainstreaming Program, CSN Lab developed Other Stories, a small-scale project dedicated to alternative education, community-building, and the promotion of discourse on LGBTQ+ rights, representation, and visibility. Like other initiatives within the program, the project approached culture, art, and literature as important tools for strengthening human rights, encouraging critical reflection, and fostering more inclusive and diverse public conversations in Armenia and the South Caucasus region.
The project created a space for engagement with literature, culture, memory, and contemporary social issues through the lens of gender and sexuality. Bringing together members of the LGBTQ+ community and participants interested in queer culture and literature, Other Stories supported dialogue around experiences and forms of self-expression that often remain marginalized within dominant cultural narratives. Through four meetings combining lectures, collective readings, audiovisual materials, and open discussions, the project also created a safe space for networking, community-building, and the exchange of experiences.
One of the project’s key areas of focus was queer literature and autofiction. Emerging several decades ago as an experimental genre, autofiction has become an important mode of literature, theatre, and cinema across different languages, geographies, and cultural contexts. Throughout its development, autofiction has remained a space for exploring subjectivity, identity, experience, and the limits of representation. It has also been closely connected to questions of gender and sexuality, creating room for diverse voices, bodies, and forms of self-expression.
The histories of autofiction and queer literature intersect in significant ways, producing new literary and artistic forms and opening alternative possibilities for writing the self. Throughout the programme, participants engaged with the works of Hervé Guibert, Édouard Louis, Abdellah Taïa, Roland Barthes, Serge Doubrovsky, Annie Ernaux, and others, while exploring broader questions of embodiment and writing, sexuality and writing, the relationship between writing and the political, the colonial and postcolonial body, le corps prostitué and writing, illness and writing, memory, class, and other themes central to queer cultural production.
By combining alternative education, collective reading, discussion, and community-building practices, Other Stories contributed to a more inclusive cultural landscape and supported a space where diverse identities, experiences, and forms of knowledge could be shared, discussed, and reimagined. Participants’ interest in continuing the conversations and the community formed around the programme also created a basis for future reading groups and regular gatherings at CSN Lab.
“Other Stories” has been implemented by the “Cultural and Social Narratives Laboratory” (CSN Lab) with the financial support of the “Pink” human rights defender NGO and Sweden.