Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to conceptualize the current feminist narratives in Kyrgyzstan concerning the societal expectations and roles of women within the country's own search for identity, while also localizing these narratives within the greater context of the country's status as a 'transitional democracy' that is catering to both 'liberal' and 'conservative' global and regional agendas, and the resulting 'hybrid morality' of the country. The paper analyses narratives of some of the most vocal groups in the country (Bishkek Feminist Initiatives, LGBT organization "Labrys", Reproductive Health Alliance Kyrgyzstan, STAB) on normative images of women, as well as their proposed alternatives to them. Additionally the paper provides background on temporalities and geographies of feminism in Kyrgyzstan from a postcolonial point of view as a complex interplay of local thought and foreign learning.

Kyrgyzstani feminist and gender studies scholarship, as well as activist network, have been quite prolific in publishing results of grant-based research, as part of the development agenda on gender in post-Soviet countries. There is literature on women in Kyrgyz economy, women and their political and social rights, bride kidnapping, Islam and gender in Kyrgyzstan. However, the vast majority of these studies paints a picture of a binary opposition between the presumably archaic or traditional gender discourses (usually related to Islam) and modernized Western-style emancipation of women from the 'universal' patriarchal system, with the in-betweenness of the Soviet period that was half-traditional and half-modern.

The paper proposes that Kyrgyzstani scholarship lacks critical reflection and analysis of this self-colonising practice, where Kyrgyz feminists and activists become a kind of 'native' informant or agent of Western feminist imperialism. Rarely do gender scholars in Central Asia question whether the main subject matter of gender studies research in Kyrgyzstan being bride kidnapping, in Kazakhstan - institute of toqals, in Uzbekistan - the self-immolation of women, and in Tajikistan/Turkmenistan - that of arranged marriages, is an example of Orientalist cliches about Central Asia, or in this case - of self-Orientalization by Central Asian feminist scholarship. Majority of gender studies in the region remains strictly developmental in logic with a straight vector teleology of progressive movement from 'backwards' tradition to Soviet half-tradition/half-modernity to idealised Western model of female emancipation.

This paper aims to provide a meta-analysis of "feminist" subjectivities in Kyrgyzstan based on the study of an interplay between the 'colonised' and 'coloniser' feminist subjectivities, and by engaging with feminist epistemologies both Western and decolonial.