Paper Short Abstract:

The paper will bring various forms of post-Soviet body politics in post-Soviet Central Asia such as correcting bodies, governing bodies and politics of perfect bodies which goes back to Soviet and also socialist ideologies of healthy lifestyle and healthy bodies.

Paper Abstract:

The paper will bring various forms of post-Soviet body politics in post-Soviet Central Asia such as correcting bodies, governing bodies and politics of perfect bodies which goes back to Soviet and also socialist ideologies of healthy lifestyle and healthy bodies. The contribution will include diverse case studies from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan namely invisible lives of disabled, banning beauty salons, and other examples of politics of perfect bodies. Gendered bodies, governed bodies are largely part of authoritarian body regimes conducted in Central Asia. The examples also include present realities of disabled individuals and those with no perfect bodies and their lives in Central Asia. Two autobiographies of women from a village in Turkmenistan and a city in Uzbekistan as well as recent ban of new Turkmen president who announced various rules for women such as ban on beauty procedures and criminalising artificial beauty. Theoretically the paper will deal with the question of agency and spaces where individual lives take place outside the public, in the shadow of invisibility and often behind the walls of institutions following Moor`s concept of “lived anatomy” or bodily praxis. Individual lives from the perspective of bodily experiences are embedded in the past and present ideological regimes of Soviet ideal bodies which was promoted through propaganda, media and other sources as part of Soviet project of creating ideal Homo Sovietikus throughout its territory (also in Central Asia) and beyond. Multiple spheres where physical body was in focus created a kind of body regimes to control and promote Soviet bodies creating a certain kind of values and requirements to human bodies where there was no place for other bodies. After the collapse of the Soviet Union the ideals and demands for perfect bodies did not dissolve in Central Asia. Soviet/socialist ideals of human body still define social acceptance of other bodies leading to dramatic situations for disabled and others. The contribution is based on a decade long (since 2005) ethnographic research in Central Asia.