This dissertation examines the role of women in post-Soviet Kazakhstan as both productive members of society and the loci of national anxieties that have created fault lines in public opinion, government policy, and international development programs. It explores how Kazakh cultural concepts of ideal womanhood are used to identify categories of women eligible for state support or who become targets of community intervention. These include survivors of domestic violence, unwed young mothers, and “at risk” girls who may strive to fulfill or deviate from the expected Kazakh norms deemed appropriate for their specific life stage. These contested expectations are embodied in national legislation, international human rights programs, and Kazakh civil society. They are implemented by social service officials who provide the aid and who perceive the women involved in them as objects of their reform projects.
Ethnographic fieldwork that provided the bulk of the research data was conducted between March 2018 and August 2019 in urban Almaty and provincial cities in southern and eastern Kazakhstan in domestic violence shelters, homes for unwed mothers, and girls’ empowerment programs. This included extended periods of participant observation supplemented by open-ended interviews with activists, crisis shelter directors and employees, and other stakeholders to generate multi-cited case studies. Because media played a significant role, the research incorporated an analysis of relevant Kazakhstani films and plays that highlight the challenges of negotiating ideals of womanhood and motherhood, propriety and martyrdom, which are also central themes animating my text. The research concludes that women in these programs respond to directives from international human rights organizations, national legislation, and changing social mores by deploying and reinterpreting Kazakh life stage ideals of womanhood. In so doing, they illustrate how women’s work and reproductive choices intersect with the goals of a national state, a changing Kazakh society, and the global discourse on women’s rights. As a contribution to the larger discourse on identity and citizenship in post-Soviet states, gender, Islam, and contemporary Kazakhstan, this study illustrates how “women’s issues” remain an unusually sensitive barometer of social values where the implicit becomes the explicit. / 2024-03-04T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/43981 |
| Date | 05 March 2022 |
| Creators | Tourtellotte, Laura Ann Chang |
| Contributors | Barfield, Thomas J. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
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