Building the Networks

This chapter examines the role of notions of gender propriety in differentiating access to Armenians women's organizations in Bourj Hammoud. It focuses on the work of two distinct types of institutions—a transnational Armenian NGO and the various women's organizations affiliated with the Armenian Dashnag Party. A closer look at these organizations show how gender, particularly the performance of normative notions of gender roles and gendered propriety, enables or disables access to the networks that produce the Armenian community in various forms. Access to these channels of services and their attendant resources differs based on women's abilities to mobilize gender, kinship, and family relations, particular kinds of class positions and professional training, linguistic skills, and even spatial, neighborhood connections. Gender propriety and class positioning allow women to connect social infrastructures, to network into other networks glossed as Armenian middle class or Dashnag Party base.