Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide
Semerdjian, Elyse · 2023
Semerdjian offers a feminist history of the Armenian Genocide centered on women and child survivors, taking tattooed and scarred bodies themselves as historical evidence. She argues that gender is pivotal to genocidal thinking, and traces how the Ottoman Armenian community was dis-membered and disfigured, then re-membered by the survivor community in the decades that followed. Rather than relying only on state archives, the book assembles what Semerdjian calls embodied archives: bodies and voices, remnants and fragments, recovered from archival scraps and personal memories. Through them she reconstructs the experiences of Armenian women absorbed into Muslim households, marked with tattoos, and later reclaimed or remembered by their community. The approach recovers voices historically silenced in both Ottoman and conventional scholarly records. The book won the 2024 AMEWS Book Award of the Association for Middle East Women's Studies.
Read the publication ↗Citation
Semerdjian, Elyse 2023. Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2023.
What this offers a reader
A history where the primary sources are survivors' own tattooed skin and remembered voices rather than government files.
A methodologically innovative feminist intervention that theorizes the body as archive, extending genocide studies beyond documentary evidence.
A tender, unflinching act of remembrance for the grandmothers whose tattoos carried the genocide on their skin.
The story of Armenian women who survived the 1915 genocide, told through the marks it left on their bodies.
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