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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how peripheral failure shapes queer life in Kutaisi, Georgia, producing affect, care, and belonging under authoritarianism, migration pressures, and hierarchies of success.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores failure as a spatial and affective condition produced by processes of peripheralisation, in which queer bodies, places, and futures are hierarchically ordered. Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Kutaisi, a post-industrial city in western Georgia, I examine how queer people inhabit spaces and temporalities marked by political stagnation, economic decline, and moral narratives of "non-success," and how these conditions shape everyday practices of care, attachment, and belonging.

Within national and increasingly authoritarian imaginaries, the periphery is not simply distant from centres of power but is actively produced as a space of delay, insufficiency, and non-arrival. Kutaisi is repeatedly framed as a city that failed to: modernise properly, remain economically productive, and to embody the future-oriented promises of the nation-state. Queer lives within this space are folded into these narratives, becoming emblematic of peripheral failure itself - non-reproductive, morally suspect, and temporally out of sync with hegemonic visions of success.

Georgia’s recent authoritarian turn has intensified these dynamics. The shift from a quasi-democratic to an openly authoritarian regime was articulated during electoral campaigns centred on "protecting families and children from a non-traditional future". Notably, early campaign events were staged in peripheral cities, marking the periphery as both more "traditional" and more governable, while simultaneously deepening the peripheralisation of queer bodies.

The paper considers how peripheral failure shapes queer everyday life in ways that are open-ended, contingent, and sometimes contradictory, raising questions about belonging, care, and the limits of hegemonic narratives of progress, success, and futurity.