Belonging between Inclusion and Exclusion: Dimensions of Ethno-Cultural Identity for Uyghur Women in Xinjiang, China

ABSTRACT

Research on Uyghur communities in China often focuses on the power and oppression of the Chinese state, neglecting the power situated in the domestic sphere and women’s bodies. My research addresses how younger Uyghur women (aged 18–35 years old) feel suffocated by the expectations of their ethnocultural identity, and how those women both conform to and reject social norms. The themes of marriage and clothing illustrate how representations and discourses of the female body reinforce the boundaries of the Uyghur community. The pleasure and pain of Uyghur identity manifests in women’s bodies during territorial insecurity of fading nationalist space. Multiple scales of identity in the body and household disrupt the imaginary cohesiveness and boundedness of territory. While the Chinese state polices Uyghur bodies, so too does Uyghur society police the bodies of other Uyghurs – especially women – as a security strategy of bordering the nation.

Acknowledgments

Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 2017 Central Eurasian Studies Society meeting in Seattle and the 2018 Political Geography Pre-Conference to the AAG in New Orleans. I would like to especially thank Aynur Kadir, Jennifer Fluri, Natalie Koch, and John O’Loughlin for commenting on previous versions of this article. Thank you also to Jo Smith Finley, Sara Smith, Banu Gökarıksel, Jennifer Hyndman and Tamar Mayer for meeting with me during the 2018 AAG meeting to talk about the article and help me formulate my ideas. All errors in the article are exclusively my own.

Notes

1. All names in this paper are pseudonyms. See the methods section for more information.

2. It is not necessarily common for Uyghurs to say they dislike all foreigners automatically. Rather there existed some negative reactions to the perceived loss of Uyghur culture as a result of foreign influence. While I was usually greeted with generous hospitality, I noticed that there was some fear of cultural death manifested as hostility towards Han Chinese and Western ideas and influence. Meanwhile, in my experience, white foreign women (namely Americans and Russians) in particular were stereotyped as being promiscuous, and sometimes assumed to be prostitutes. This hostility towards outside cultural influence manifested not only in terms of religious exclusivity, but also in terms of exclusive practices around food, music, fashion, and behaviour, especially when it came to sexuality.

3. The terms “pain” and “pleasure” are not emic concepts, but are terms I am using as a connection to the special issue that this paper is published in, “Nationalism between Pleasure and Hate.”

4. Thank you to one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing this out to me.

5. While Han society is also framed by gendered norms, chastity before marriage is not socially required. Although having at least one son is often expected for Han people in rural areas, more Han women in the cities are choosing not to get married or have children (Gaetano 2015; Wang and Hesketh 2018). Nevertheless, the increasing reluctance among Han women to marry and have children is frowned on by many in Chinese society, which stigmatises ‘left-over women’ (see Gaetano 2014).

6. The research was conducted under best practices for anthropological research, and under the University of Colorado’s IRB approval (#16-0115) and informed consent guidelines.

7. As with many of my deeper and more engaged conversations in Uyghur during daily life, this occasionally involved asking the speaker to slow down or repeat themselves, or a pause so that I could check my dictionary, but otherwise the interviews were conducted with ease in Uyghur. As time went on, I became more and more fluent in Uyghur, especially when it came to my interview questions, and I was able to conduct the interviews with complete ease by 2017.

8. I did not collect demographic information from the 52 informal interviews.

9. In very few cases can interviewees be described with something as simple as “rural” or “urban” origins. Sometimes the girls/women were from the suburbs, sometimes they were born in a rural area but had moved to the city at a young age, some were newcomers to the city, some had moved to the city as adults but had been in the city for 10 years. Either way, I could not disclose too many details that would compromise the anonymity of the responses. I intentionally left this information out to keep the data confidential. Rarely are things as simple and black and white as “rural” versus “urban” and that these are reductions in the actual situations, but that is the most information I can provide to keep the data confidential.

10. In Uyghur: nime keysem özemning ishi. See the song here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79uYIqs3t2E.

11. While in some contexts, perhaps the word posma is used to mean a cap for a baby, in this context this participant was referring to a winter cap used in the winter.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant DGE 1650115 and 1633894.