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Abstract

Soviet reproductive politics in Central Asia were a complex site where ethno-racial hierarchies and imperial biopolitics were weaved into shaping the “Soviet society.” This research shifts focus to the historical roots of educated mother figure and how it was constructed through colonial driven reproductive governance. In Uzbekistan, the 1927 unveiling campaign Hujum (meaning attack) aimed at women’s “emancipation”, dismantling Islamic gender norms while promoting a new socialist maternal ideal. The Soviet ideology constructed the “educated mother” through literacy campaigns, “mother heroine” awards for mothers with 10 children and more, maternity leaves, and women’s labour force integration (Kandiyoti, 2007; Northrop, 2004). While such policies led to social transformation, they also imposed Soviet modernity as a colonial civilizing mission (Tlostanova, 2010). However, such governance extended beyond policy into visual and scientific regimes. Soviet propaganda posters idealized motherhood as patriotic labour, linking maternal health, infant care, and hygiene to socialist success. Simultaneously, Soviet anthropologists such as Iasevich and Oshanin carried out state-funded projects photographing and measuring naked Uzbek women to define racialized “body types” and construct a normative female Uzbek subject (Northrop, 2004). The concept of the Soviet "educated mother" in Uzbekistan resonates with global maternalist ideologies from US Republican Motherhood's civic reproduction (Kerber, 1980) to imperial hygiene campaigns sustaining empire (Yuval-Davis, 1994), but with a particular colonialized Central Asian bodies. After unveiling campaign, women in Uzbekistan were symbolically exalted into education, yet materially burdened and expected to give birth to the socialist future, while also contributing to Soviet economic development through compulsory agricultural labour (cotton picking) and factory work. Though the literacy campaigns profoundly expanded women’s education levels, it also functioned as tools for ideological re-socialization. The aim of this paper is to interrogate how reproductive governance in Soviet Uzbekistan operated through the figure of the “educated mother” as a site of both biopolitical control and potential agency. It asks: How were childbirth, contraception, and family-making regulated to shape a Soviet society? Using a postcolonial feminist historiographical lens, the study draws on Soviet-era policy documents, propaganda art, anthropological studies, and oral histories. It critically engages with interdisciplinary scholarship on gender, race, and modernization in Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia (Sultanalieva, 2023). This study contributes to understanding Soviet reproductive governance as a tool of imperial control and highlights the need for pluriversal and intersectional approaches to feminist history in Central Asia that position the voices and bodies historically rendered invisible.

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Abstract

This paper examines the value-motivational sphere and psychological well-being of mothers raising children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in Kazakhstan, situating their experiences within broader debates on gender, care, and social support in Central Eurasia. While autism is frequently addressed through medical and educational frameworks, this study argues that the everyday realities of mothers of children with ASD cannot be understood without attention to culturally specific expectations of motherhood, gendered care obligations, and the limited availability of institutional support. In the Kazakhstani context, maternal resilience emerges not simply as an individual psychological trait, but as a socially structured response to uncertainty, stigma, and unequal distributions of emotional and practical labor.

The paper draws on empirical data collected from mothers raising children with ASD in Kazakhstan, including survey-based materials on resilience, social support, and related psychological predictors, as well as a contextual analysis of cultural norms surrounding family responsibility, caregiving, and women’s roles. Methodologically, the study combines psychological analysis with a broader socio-cultural interpretation in order to connect individual experiences to regional patterns of social organization.

The paper argues that the emotional and motivational experiences of these mothers are shaped by an interaction between personal coping resources and external cultural pressures. Preliminary findings indicate that social support functions as a key predictor of resilience, while intolerance of uncertainty, persistent caregiving burden, and normative expectations of self-sacrificing motherhood intensify emotional strain. At the same time, cultural and spiritual values may serve both as sources of meaning and as mechanisms that reinforce gendered responsibility for care.

By focusing on Kazakhstan, this paper contributes to Central Eurasian studies by bringing disability, care, and maternal experience into conversations that have more often centered on nationalism, state-building, or geopolitics. It also contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship on gender and care by showing how autism-related caregiving in Central Eurasia is mediated by local moral worlds, family norms, and uneven support infrastructures.