Paper long abstract:

My talk will deal with the concept of the "national body" or the body of the nation (Yuval-Davis) represented in different discourses in Central Asia. Apart from arguing and deciphering the "power" side of such attempts to nationalise women's bodies and to ethnicize them further, I will also highlight the creative resistance to these attempts. Women are not the silent "abused" and moralised bodies of objects of nationalisation but active participants in these discussions. Some prefer to accept the rules of the game following the legitimation through "sacred traditions" and others revolt against these frameworks. In deconstructing these responses I question why the response to these policies, informal and formalised rules have met such diverting approaches in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. In Almaty women are actively protesting against shaming men (uyat-man) by exposing their naked bodies and openly discussing their sexual preferences. "Toqal" - second wife and "uyat-man" - literally shaming man from Kazakh language quickly became the new cultural terms in Kazakhstan that approaches hybrid globalised and traditionalised divides. In Uzbekistan traditional "ikat" silk turns what is known as "national dress" into the trendiest and expensive clothes beyond just Uzbek borders. There is even jeans ikat on sale in Uzbekistan. At the same time Tajik government officially announces the "traditional dress" dress code for women. These divergent discussions, trends, restrictions and frameworks only target women - men in all of these cases do not fall into the "nationalisation" of the body frame. In this talk I question how women's representation of the "body of the nation" changed in the past two decades and how and why these trends vary in different countries, contexts and regimes.