Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how secondary school students in Kazakhstan learn masculinities and femininities in and out of school and how do they resist dominant discourses of gender. Data analysed comprise participatory activity and focus group discussions with eighty students selected from grade 7 & 8.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how young people learn masculinities and femininities in and out of school in post-Socialist Kazakhstan. Post-socialist societies have undergone profound shifts over the last three decades, but young people’s voices and gendered lives in post-socialist contexts remain under-represented in childhood studies. The young people participating in this study are schooled in a context of significant educational reforms borrowed from the West. They live in a paradoxical context in which gender equality is enshrined in the constitution, but nation-building projects employ re-traditionalised discourses of gender. Despite universal access to schooling and a higher representation of women at the tertiary level, widening multi-sectoral gaps exist at the expense of women. The paper draws on poststructuralist and postcolonial insights to understand how schools, families, and peer groups shape young Kazakhstanis’ construction of being a female and male and how youth narratives are linked to the political, economic, social and educational contexts of their existence. An ethnographically informed qualitative design was used comprising a participatory activity and focus group discussions. Eighty young people, 40 girls and 40 boys, aged 13-15 from grades 7 and 8, were selected from six schools, three in the south (Almaty) and three in the north of Kazakhstan (Pavlodar). Participating schools were selected purposefully to help understand the ways gender intersected with regional/local norms, medium of instruction and rural vs urban location. The analysis focuses on: how do young people construct masculinities and femininities in school in relation to the curriculum, disciplinary regimes, teacher practices, and peer culture?; in what ways do their gendered performances after school shape their sense of being male and female?; what are the long-term implications of their gendered experiences on their imagined futures?; and how do young people exercise agency to resist dominant discourses of gender circulating at the local/global levels. School learning resources and print, electronic and social media impacted youth identity formation in gendered ways. Both girls and boys reflected on their gendered lives at school and outside school. Young people drew on essentialised notions of gender to normalise these differences. Cultural discourses were used to rationalise the gender order.

Nevertheless, some girls and a few boys resisted essentialised notions of gender and culture by drawing on constitutional rights and equality discourses. Greater resistance was articulated by students in Russian medium schools and those in the Pavlodar. The educational implications of the findings are discussed.