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.