“Can you beat your wife, yes or no?”: a study of hegemonic femininity in Kazakhstan’s online discourses

ABSTRACT

This study investigates how standards of hegemonic femininity in Kazakhstan are utilised by the public in online spaces to police Kazakh women’s bodies, glorify national culture, and normalise violence against women who do not conform to these standards. Drawing upon discourse analysis as the primary method for examining available comments on Facebook and Instagram, this paper is one of the first studies of modern Kazakh nationalism from a critical gendered perspective that situates discourses about Kazakh women in the context of sexual violence and demonstrates the “weaponisation” of women’s bodies and the normalisation of violence against them in online spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Gendered nationalism
• gender-based violence
• online discourse analysis
• nationalism and religion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In my work, I use the word “Kazakh” to refer to ethnically Kazakh people and the word “Kazakhstani” to refer to citizens of Kazakhstan regardless of ethnicity.

2 Kazakh slang for “men who shame others.”

3 In my study I utilize the word online to mean found on the internet, connected to the internet.

4 For brevity, I refer to both forms of violence as rape and domestic abuse from here on.

5 The Kazakh word for daughter-in-law.

6 Nursultan Nazarbayev is the first President of Kazakhstan who has been in power since the country’s independence in 1991 until 2019. Nazarbayev holds the Leader of the Nation (Elbasy) title that guarantees a set of powerful privileges to Nazarbayev and members of his family for life, including immunity in court and an ability to speak in front of the parliament upon Nazarbayev’s wish.

7 The original sentencing occurred in July 2018 and resulted in 2.5 of jailtime. In December 2019, the sentences were extended to 5 years after a second trial.

8 One of the most popular Kazakhstani news outlets, with 1.6 million followers on Instagram.

9 Another large pro-government news outlet, with 762,000 followers on the platform.

10 Auyl is the Kazakh term for a village or small rural settlement.

11 Mambet typically means a person who comes from a rural area; only speaks Kazakh (or speaks Russian very badly); lacks proper education; and has bad manners. It is typically used by the urban Russian-speaking public to disparage others.