Abstract

Panel Abstract: This interdisciplinary panel examines how bodies are staged and contested in Kazakhstani cultural production. Centering gendered embodiment, disability, and liminal somatic states, the presenters analyze opera, prose, and poetry from the 1930s to the present. The panelists ask how Soviet and post-Soviet ideological and artistic conventions have shaped the representational frameworks through which bodies are rendered visible, and what creative strategies Kazakhstani authors have employed to reclaim corporeal subjectivity on their own terms.

The first two presenters open this discussion by turning to gendered configurations of “normative” bodies by probing Soviet era constructions of femininity across literary and operatic production. Zere Baitenova traces orientalist and “civilizing” narratives embedded in the staging of Zhibek from the infamous Qyz Zhibek opera, comparing how the heroine’s agency changes across its Moscow and Kazakh productions. Laura Berdikhojayeva deconstructs conventional narrative tropes of “the Qazaq woman” within the framework of Soviet national literatures and their deliberate unmaking in Sara Myñjasarova’s novel Tözim šeñberi (1987).

Moving to the late- and post-Soviet eras, the next two presenters engage with literary representations of bodies marked by vulnerability and social liminality. Verena Zabel draws attention to literary strategies for depicting bodies with disabilities, proposing “empathetic storytelling” as a focal category for reading Roza Muqanova’s short story «Мәңгілік бала бейне» (1990). Zabel illustrates how Muqanova employs this narrative mode to de-stigmatize her protagonist Laila, a young woman suffering the consequences of Soviet nuclear testing in Kazakhstan. Finally, Aida Anderson turns to bodies caught amidst insomnia in Aman Rakhmetov’s poetry, where sleep is rendered not simply as rest but a state of vulnerability and suspension. Drawing on Rakhmetov’s collection «Человек засыпает и становится фотографией», Anderson explores how contemporary Kazakh poetry negotiates stillness, exposure, and performance across page and visual media platforms.