Agency and resistance amongst queer people in Kazakhstan

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the everyday lives of queer people in Kazakhstan, exploring how they express agentic power and negotiate their queer identity. This research is based on a Foucauldian-informed narrative analysis of in-depth interviews with 11 people who identify as queer and live in Kazakhstan. Findings show that the choice and ability to regulate one’s visibility are crucial expressions of queer agency and resistance. This paper expands on previously published research on gender and sexuality in Central Asia by focusing beyond the issues of violation of human rights and the difficult experiences of queer people, by considering instances of acceptance, support and positive experiences alongside experiences of homophobia, transphobia and discrimination.

KEYWORDS:

• queer
• LGBT
• Kazakhstan
• Central Asia
• everyday life
• visibility

Acknowledgements

I express my gratitude to Seamus Prior and Mason Neely, as well as to three anonymous reviewers, for their constructive comments and suggestions of how to improve this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I use the term ‘queer’ to encompass people who do not conform to normative sexualities and gender binary. During interviews with my research participants, I asked them explicitly about their preferred terms of identification. I adopt the technique of cultural ‘dubbing’ (Boellstorff 2005) as I try to retain the language used by people in their everyday lives. I also include original Russian words to signal complexity and the subjective nature of the terms of identification, as well as discrepancies that occur through translation.

2 This project was also informed by the work of Michel Foucault (Levitanus 2020). Foucault (1978) famously uses historical processes to argue that sexuality is a discursively constructed category with complex roots in Western culture rather than a natural fact of human life. For the purposes of this article, I concentrate on the work of Butler (1990), who adopts Foucault’s argument that ‘sexuality’ is discursively produced and extends it to include gender.

3 I explore queer experiences in the light of research from Central Asia, Russia and in an Anglo-American context. As pointed out by Stella (2015), differences between Soviet and Western sexualities have been portrayed in very stark terms, reinforcing orientalist representation of the region. By using a comparative research framework, I argue against Kazakhstan’s exceptionalism, highlighting the similarities and divergences in non-heterosexual and non-cisgender regulatory practices and experiences across the Central Asian region, in the context of post-socialist states and within a broader research framework. In that respect, I follow the call to reflexively use the West as a socio-historical construct rather than a normative paradigm (Kudaibergenova 2016; Stella 2015).

4 Participants’ names and other identifiable information were changed, apart from one; Gulzada chose to opt out of anonymization.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific funding.