Log in to star items.
- Convenor:
-
Hélène Thibault
(Nazarbayev University)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Aksana Ismailbekova
(Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO))
- Discussant:
-
Galym Zhussipbek
(SDU University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Theme:
- Gender Studies
Abstract
Scholars specializing in Central Asia have increasingly adopted gender as a critical analytical lens. This allows to examine the diverse nuances of human experience, interrogating constructs of masculinity and femininity alongside broader gender identities and discourses as they intersect with colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism. However, scholarship has frequently conflated gender with women’s issues and lived realities, resulting in a significant oversight of male experiences within the existing literature. While recent scholarship on nationalizing states has primarily focused on patriarchal norms and the oppression of women, only a limited number of studies have ventured beyond these themes. This panel proposes a critical reading to the existing gender narratives with a focus on men and masculinities and aims at conceptualizing the construction of masculinities and its impact on the lived experiences of men.
This interdisciplinary panel examines the construction and negotiation of masculinity through different lenses: visual culture, public health, and marital patterns. In particular, it will explore how masculine figures are constructed in the contemporary Kazakhstani cinema and how patriarchal ideals of male authority and the flawed men figures found in reflect anxieties about class mobility, urban–rural divides and competing Kazakh-and Russian-speaking identities. A second paper looks into practices of chemsex and men at risk in Kazakhstan and through the concept of structural edgework, illustrates that the practice is not a monolith. Instead, its character is shaped by the practitioner's intersectional position. Finally, a third paper looks into marriage dynamics and asks how unmarried men in Kazakhstan experience and navigate the social and family pressure to marry. The study reveals that in contrast to women who are often shamed for being unmarried, the social burden for men shifts from marital status to the fulfillment of filial and financial obligations.
Together, these papers mobilize a diverse range of perspectives that illuminate the complex lived experiences of Central Asian men. By doing so, we hope to move beyond reductive archetypes and generate critical insights into how masculinities are negotiated, performed, and transformed within the region’s historical and cultural landscapes.
Accepted papers
Abstract
This paper investigates marital dynamics in Kazakhstan, and more specifically, unmarried men’s experiences in navigating family and social pressure to get married. Kazakhstani society consistently shows high marriage rates with individuals marrying relatively early when contrasted to world averages. Statistics show that the average marriage age for women is 25,7 years and 27,9 years for women and men respectively (National Bureau of Statistics 2024).
Previous literature on family and marital dynamics in Kazakhstan and Central Asia has been fairly female-centric, highlighting the pressure on women to get married (Van den Brink 2025), the burden carried by wives and mothers (Kudaibergenova 2018; Zhussipbek & Nagayeva 2021), violent marriage practices such as bride kidnapping (Absatar & Alishayeva 2023), or violence taking place within family units (Arystanbek 2023). Only a handful of studies have addressed the issue of marriage from a male perspective (Commercio 2022; Kim & Karioris 2020), both of which have identified a causal link between shifting socio-economic conditions and masculine marital trajectories in Kyrgyzstan.
This paper investigates marriage dynamics in contemporary Kazakhstan, specifically interrogating how unmarried men navigate and negotiate the multifaceted pressures—both familial and societal—to enter into matrimony. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 15 unmarried Kazakhstani men in their thirties and forties, this study investigates the specific sociocultural pressures exerted on men to enter into marriage. The research maps the diverse sources of marital expectations—ranging from familial mandates to broader social stigmas. The findings are expected to demonstrate a gendered divergence in the timing of social pressure. While women in their late twenties and thirties face immediate stigma for non-conformity to marital norms (Van den Brink 2025), men appear to experience a 'delayed' scrutiny, with marriage-related pressures. In addition, in contrast to women, the social burden for men shifts from marital status to the fulfillment of filial and financial obligations.
Abstract
Critical scholarship on chemsex, the sexualised use of substances such as mephedrone, alpha-PVP, and GHB/GBL, has analysed the practice through frameworks of neoliberal restructuring and homonormativity, frameworks presupposing political formations in which certain sexual minorities achieved conditional social inclusion. These frameworks travel poorly to contexts where no such formation exists. This study examines chemsex in Kazakhstan, where sexual non-conformity is formally legal but socially persecuted, and where the Soviet-era narcological registry transforms healthcare into an apparatus of surveillance, collapsing the distinction between patient and criminal.
Drawing on Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) of in-depth interviews with seven men at the most risk of HIV practising chemsex in Almaty, this study extends the concept of structural edgework to demonstrate that the same practice constitutes qualitatively different phenomena depending on the practitioner's position within intersecting structures of ethnicity, class, self-acceptance, and institutional access. Three superordinate themes trace an arc from the conditions constituting the edge participants sought to cross, through the embodied phenomenology of crossing it, to the erosion of control as the boundary shifted beneath them. The same substance generated self-recovery, self-dissolution, relational restoration, and self-suspension across different participants; chemsex ranged from bounded recreation to existential survival.
The central finding is a structural gradient along which voluntariness, phenomenological character, function, and consequence compounded rather than varying independently. Participants with the greatest pharmacological expertise experienced the most severe consequences, directly challenging intervention models premised on information provision. The single successful stabilisation occurred through environmental change, non-coercive shelter, therapy, and consistent human contact, rather than through knowledge acquisition or individual resolve. These findings reframe chemsex by shifting analytical focus from individual motivations to structurally distributed positions, with implications for differentiated harm reduction in contexts where institutional hostility forecloses conventional pathways to care.
Abstract
This paper analyses how contemporary Kazakh cinema constructs and interrogates masculinity in the context of post-Soviet social transformation. Since the 2000s, many films have centred on male protagonists navigating the pressures placed on men in a rapidly changing social environment. Male-dominated narratives foreground tensions between patriarchal norms and shifting gender expectations while also reflecting transformations in class relations and national identity.
Through a close reading of selected films from the 2010s–2020s, the paper identifies several recurring masculine figures: the corrupt man of power; the conflicted urban professional negotiating modernity; the marginalised man struggling to retain dignity amid economic instability; and the hyper-dominant figure of toxic masculinity who asserts control through physical aggression. Popular comedies add further archetypes: the immature and often unattractive “man-child” who nevertheless gets the girl; the boastful but incompetent macho man; the opportunistic trickster navigating informal economies; the henpecked husband whose authority collapses at home; and the ungrateful or greedy son whose moral failure is exposed through the loss or neglect of his mother.
These figures expose tensions between patriarchal ideals of male authority and the flawed men who populate contemporary narratives, while also reflecting anxieties about class mobility, urban–rural divides and competing Kazakh- and Russian-speaking identities. The paper argues that Kazakh cinema has become a key cultural arena where masculinity is both reinforced and contested in contemporary Kazakhstan.