Paper long abstract:

Focusing on the close reading of the Soviet concept of 'Woman of the East', I recount how the former Soviet region has been historically implicated in the dynamics of race and coloniality of gender, and how those dynamics still reverberate in the form of palpably unjust social formations today. The Soviet state applied the concept of 'Woman of the East' to non-European, non-Slavic, non-white women from the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, the Far East and the North. I suggest a critical vantage point at this cultural construct in order to interpret 'Woman of the East' as a gendered racial category that brings together scientific racism and colonial technologies, Eurocentrism, the Russian Empire's ethnographic explorations, Marxist-Leninist imaginations, capitalist logics, and Soviet policies. Many scholars reveal the contradictions of the Soviet declarations of equality that in fact muted and erased non-white, non-European, non-Slavic people. As such, the Soviet state never fully disrupted the colonial legacies and racial discourses of the Russian Empire and European Enlightenment but combined them with new ideas about modernity, progress, and equality that produced specific forms of racialization. Therefore, I turn to Woman of the Soviet East in order to interrogate, reflect, and theorize possibilities for critical thinking about the entanglements of colonial, racial and gendered politics in the post-Soviet context. Specifically, I juxtapose the analysis of the Soviet books, monographs, and posters devoted to the concept of 'Woman of the East' with the exploration of the public debates (i.e. media, activist, scholarly) about the state violence towards women migrants from the former 'Soviet East' in Russia. After the collapse of the USSR, the amount of state and police violence towards migrants from the former 'Soviet East' increased significantly in Russia. Some scholars explain this situation as a derivative of the post-Soviet transition to capitalism and a model of "Europeanness" that is specifically hostile to those deemed non-European and non-white. In turn, I suggest that the post-Soviet politics of racialization are rooted in the Soviet ideologies and politics towards people from the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, the Far East and the North. Although the Soviet concept of 'Woman of the East' is not in use today, its legacies are still in motion and facilitate the gendered colonial tropes of thinking about the former 'Soviet East'.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the development of policies related to legal gender recognition (LGR) for transgender people in post-Soviet countries. Over the past three years three countries in the region have significantly altered their procedures of LGR - Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine in 2017, Russia in 2018. Currently the procedure is being revised in Kazakhstan as well. I argue that this timing is no coincidental and reflects the growing capacity of local, national and international trans movements to influence state actors. In Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine the drafting process for the new regulations included direct consultations between officials from the Ministries of Health and trans activists; in Russia it was less transparent, although input from the activists was taken into account. This is in marked contrast with the pre-existing procedures in the region which had been adopted at the initiative of doctors and medical beaurocracies when the trans movement was non-existent. The resulting procedures in all three countries include obtaining a psychiatric diagnosis ("transsexualism" or the like) but require no compulsory surgeries thus representing a compromise between the traditional definition of a "woman" and a "man" based on one's genitalia and other biological markers (which is supported by medical authorities) and the activists' insistance that legal gender should be assigned on the basis of self-determination (without surgeries or diagnosis). Moreover, these opposing views are a reflection of tensions between Western-emanating ideas about gender (borrowed by post-Soviet trans activists) and those rooted in Soviet medical tradition. What is interesting is that the resulting procedures of LGR are far more liberal than the societal attitudes towards trans people in respective countries, which is perhaps the result of trans issues being less visible than the widely discussed "LGBT" issues as a whole. The study is based on the interviews with key individuals familiar with the process; for Russia, this is supplemented by author's personal involvement in advocacy leading to the adoption of the new procedure.

Paper long abstract:

Being a transgender in Soviet Kazakhstan and in present independent Kazakhstan seem equal in the level of pathologization of the condition, requiring to undergo humiliating medical and legal procedures for official recognition (Feminita, 2016; Alma-TQ, 2016). According to activists, for transgender people in Kazakhstan the legal gender recognition procedure requires humiliating, invasive, and abusive procedures in order to change gender on official documents, which includes extensive physical and psychiatric medical examinations, hormone therapy, sterilization, and gender reassignment genital surgery (Alma-TQ 2016). However, this was not always the case, and the attitude to gender 'deviance' in Kazakhstan has changed over time.

This is an overview article about transsexuality in Kazakhstan considered nowadays as gender 'deviance', the history of which may be traced back from shamanistic tradition through Tsarist Russia to Soviet Union - resulting in the current situation. Kazakhstan had transgender practices long before the globalised spread of knowledge or influence of feminism, as crossdressing and transgender motives are fixed in Kazakh folklore such as "Dudar Kyz", "Ezhigeldy" (Radlov, 1870), although they are never publicly discussed. At the same time the religious authorities in Central Asia seem to have had a more relaxed attitude to transgressive practices, maintaining a delicate position regarding the tradition of bachi - beautiful dancing boys. This compares negatively with contemporary attitude of Muslim authorities to gender 'deviance' (homosexuality, bisexuality, transsexualism), who proclaim homosexuality as the sin of the people of Lot (referring to Sodom and Gomorrah) and as such consider it one of the gravest sins.

Why have Muslim authorities in Kazakhstan expressed so different attitude to transgender issues and homosexuality in the past and in the present? It is possible to assume that it is because transgender and homosexuality are seen by them as only Western values and identities, called by researchers, specifically by Roscoe, as 'homosexualization' (1997) - framework about sexual orientation and gender identity described through medicalized and legal empirical nexus. Murray and Roscoe (1997b: 5) made a critical review of Western model of homosexual identity that was disseminated for decades as unique and having no references to the history of ancient, medieval Muslim societies where gender variance and homosexual conduct existed in different places from Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, Arab medieval Spain, Balkans in 13th till 19th centuries. In essence the negativity seen today towards homosexuality and transsexuality are an aspect of opposition to Western imperialist domination of values and knowledge production.

Paper long abstract:

Being queer - lesbian, bisexual or transgender - in the Kyrgyzstani public discourse is the ultimate expression of a 'bad girl'. Main reason being that she is not interested in men (or at least not exclusively), and so not interested in marrying them and providing them with all the accompanying services expected of a wife. In the contemporary setting this definition of a 'bad girl' seems to have expanded to include also feminists, who question the hegemonic role of males in Kyrgyzstan, re-established after the fall of the Soviet Union as the country grappled with its unwanted sovereignty (Kandiyoti, 2007). The reactions of the public and officials alike to the recent feminist march of 8th March in Kyrgyzstan, where a few slogans were LGBT-themed, indicate that in the mainstream discourse feminists are now equated to lesbians. This has caused a whole host of other intra-movement clashes within the women's rights circles, many of whom are horrified at the thought of being conflated identity-wise with the radical and hated lesbians, whom they consider as the true 'bad girls'.

However, the definitions of 'good/bad girls' are heavily dependent on the temporal and spatial contexts of the analysis. The same set of qualifiers that today generalises feminists and lesbians into 'bad girls/women' would be different 30 years ago, when a girl possessing these qualities would have been described as a 'good' Soviet girl/woman. The relationship is further complicated when taken out of the macro and micro contexts, as a 'bad girl' may be considered a 'good girl/woman' in a different place in the same time. These nuances allow the introduction of Bakhtinian "chronotopes" into analysis, which help in understanding how "specific timespace configurations enable, allow and sanction specific modes of behaviour as positive, desired or compulsory (and disqualify deviations from that order in negative terms)" (Bloemmaert, De Fina, 2016:5 ).

This paper attempts to understand the chronotopic representation of feminists (both heterosexual and queer) in Kyrgyzstan through their self-narratives of living under the pressure of the 'good/bad woman' dichotomy, while localising these narratives within the greater context of the country's recent history as a 'transitional democracy' that is catering to both 'liberal' and 'conservative' global and regional agendas of religion and tradition.