Paper long abstract:

After a widely-reported tragedy of five children perishing in a house fire in Kazakhstan's capital while their parents were away at night-shift jobs, conflicting imperatives of gendered productive and reproductive labor came to the forefront of the Kazakhstani's public consciousness in early 2019. This highly-publicized case in turn ignited a conflagration of civic protests at regional administrative centers by "mothers with many children" (mnogodetnye mamy, kopbala analar), the official designation for low-income women who have four or more children and are eligible for monthly monetary allocations from the government. The popularity and sympathy that these mother's protests sparked were widely attributed as a leading factor in President Nazarbayev's decree to fire the standing government on February 21, and may have also contributed to his decision to resign on March 19, after nearly 30 years of rule.

In the aftermath of Nazarbayev's resignation, these mother's protests have petered out and media attention has shifted away from highlighting their demands; moreover, when other protestors gathered against the renaming of the capital from Astana to Nur-Sultan in a decree by newly-appointed President Tokayev, they were quickly jailed. Meanwhile, promises made by the new government to increase childcare benefits and address housing shortages for low-income families have yet to be fulfilled, and women continue to labor at precarious jobs while birthing and raising the new generation of Kazakhstani citizens. This paper is informed by theories of women's reproductive and productive roles in relation to the state (Yuval-Davis 1997) and draws upon media analysis and ethnographic fieldwork to examine the extent to which women's work - at the job, within the family, and in the public sphere - can engender governmental responses and change in a field constrained by economic hardship, corruption, and patriarchal demands by both society and the state.