Gender Politics in Post-communist Eurasia
Gender Politics in Post-communist Eurasia

Author: Linda Racioppi

Publisher: Eurasian Political Econ. & Pub

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13:

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Reflecting on two decades of experience, Gender Politics in Post-Communist Eurasia offers new and important insights into contemporary global gender politics by leading scholars from Central Asia, Europe, and the United States - into the contemporary dynamics of gender politics in a critical area of the world. The volume includes case studies of Romania, Russia, and Tajikistan; comparative analyses of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan; and regional examinations of Eastern and Central Europe and Central Asia. The interdisciplinary contributions focus on issues such as the influence of global and regional norms on women's rights, the impact of international political economy on women's social and economic positions, and the implications of international and regional migration and human trafficking for women's lives. Gender Politics in Post-Communist Eurasia provides wide-ranging analyses that capture the distinctiveness of specific countries and regions while illuminating the interplay between the local and the global in gender politics.

Gender and Identity Construction
Gender and Identity Construction

Author: Feride Acar

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-12-28

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 900449202X

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This volume deals with issues and problems of national and gender identity in Central Asia, the Caucasus and Turkey. Articles discuss experiences and position of women vis-à-vis state intervention, economic, political and cultural change, in both public and private spheres of life. In the book the real life conditions and experiences of women are analyzed on three complementary levels. The first of these is the economic and institutional circumstances shaped by structural adjustment policies, globalization and transnational policies. The second is realities of everyday life, particularly pertaining to family, religion, tradition and education. The third level is that of politics and ideology where national and nationalist discourses often build on the gender identity shaped by the economic and social levels. The book does not only present a cross cultural analysis of women's position in the region but also reflects the varied perspectives of female scholars from many different countries and disciplines.

Gender Politics in Central Asia
Gender Politics in Central Asia

Author: Christa Hämmerle

Publisher: Böhlau Verlag Köln Weimar

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 9783412201401

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In Zentralasien - Kasachstan, Kirgisien, Tadschikistan, Turkmenien und Usbekistan - führte der nach dem Ende des Sozialismus eingeleitete Umbau in eine politische, ökonomische und kulturelle Krise. Die geschlechtsspezifischen Implikationen dieses Übergangs sind schwerwiegend. Sie manifestieren sich vor allem als Einkommensverluste sowie im Verschwinden von Arbeitsplätzen und sozialer Sicherheit. Zusehends werden Arbeitslosigkeit und Armut feminisiert, patriarchalische Strukturen und Gewalt werden virulent. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes sammeln Material über die Situation in den zentralasiatischen Staaten, um es aus der Geschlechterperspektive und vor dem Hintergrund der Erfahrungen von Frauen und Frauenorganisationen vor Ort zu analysieren. Die durchweg englischsprachigen Beiträge setzen die aktuellen Lebenssituationen von Frauen in politische, soziale, ökonomische und kulturelle Kontexte und liefern darüber hinaus - stets mit historischer Perspektive - grundlegende Informationen und Daten. The international public has taken a while to notice the specific problems of Central Asia and its significance for Europe - both politically and as a subject of research - in contrast to its immediate attention to the post-communist states in Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe. The origins of this book go back to a project on gender politics in Central Asia intended to both collect material on the situation in the countries of Central Asia with regard to organisations and women's own experiences and to analyse the findings from a gender perspective. At the same time, the project was intended to stimulate research on the region and to bring the Central Asian states into the discussions that are currently going on in women's and gender studies. The eight contributions to this book deal with gender politics in Central Asia and, in doing so, put women's current life situations into political, social, economic, and cultural contexts. Each essay focuses on some special issue, but beyond this specific focus the essays provide basic information and data on the state in question - demographic and economic structures or political and ideological conditions.

Veiled Empire
Veiled Empire

Author: Douglas T. Northrop

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2016-06-08

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 1501702963

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Drawing on extensive research in the archives of Russia and Uzbekistan, Douglas Northrop here reconstructs the turbulent history of a Soviet campaign that sought to end the seclusion of Muslim women. In Uzbekistan it focused above all on a massive effort to eliminate the heavy horsehair-and-cotton veils worn by many women and girls. This campaign against the veil was, in Northrop's view, emblematic of the larger Soviet attempt to bring the proletarian revolution to Muslim Central Asia, a region Bolsheviks saw as primitive and backward. The Soviets focused on women and the family in an effort to forge a new, "liberated" social order.This unveiling campaign, however, took place in the context of a half-century of Russian colonization and the long-standing suspicion of rural Muslim peasants toward an urban, colonial state. Widespread resistance to the idea of unveiling quickly appeared and developed into a broader anti-Soviet animosity among Uzbeks of both sexes. Over the next quarter-century a bitter and often violent confrontation ensued, with battles being waged over indigenous practices of veiling and seclusion.New local and national identities coalesced around these very practices that had been placed under attack. Veils became powerful anticolonial symbols for the Uzbek nation as well as important markers of Muslim propriety. Bolshevik leaders, who had seen this campaign as an excellent way to enlist allies while proving their own European credentials as enlightened reformers, thus inadvertently strengthened the seclusion of Uzbek women—precisely the reverse of what they set out to do. Northrop's fascinating and evocative book shows both the fluidity of Central Asian cultural practices and the real limits that existed on Stalinist authority, even during the ostensibly totalitarian 1930s.

Lost Voices
Lost Voices

Author: Yvonne Corcoran-Nantes

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Published: 2013-07-04

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 184813729X

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In 1991 the collapse of the Communist Party and the dissolution of the Soviet Union launched the republics of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan into an unexpected self-declared independence and a precarious, uncertain future. Emerging from almost seventy-five years of Soviet tutelage all three republics embarked on a process of radical change. Central Asian women's lives have been profoundly affected during the huge upheavals of sovietization in the 1920s and democratisation in the 1990s, but their experiences have gone unresearched and undocumented. If Central Asia was generally considered to be the forgotten world of the Soviet Union, Central Asian women constitute the 'lost voices' of Central Asia. Yvonne Corcoran-Nantes offers a timely analysis into the lives of Muslim women during the Soviet era, and considers the impact of the shift from Soviet communism to Western capitalist ideals and its impact on gender relations in the region. The uneasy synthesis between socialism and Islam under the Soviet regime offered many women considerable status and personal freedom in public life but these gains have been rapidly eroded in the process of 'democratization'. Opportunities for women have entered into serious decline in terms of employment, education and socio-political status. Unlike many commentators, she offers a convincing argument that the main threat to the socio-political status of women in Central Asia is not Islamic fundamentalism, but the imposition of free market principles and Western 'liberal democratic' ideals. Woven into the text is a also subtle and nuanced analysis of the ways in which Central Asian women negotiate feminism, whether ushered in by Soviet women during sovietization, or by western NGOs in the region today. As a special consultant to UNESCAP, the author was one of the first researchers to undertake substantial research in the republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan in the post-independence period and this book is based on her interviews with women from the region from all sections of Central Asian society.

Post-Soviet Women
Post-Soviet Women

Author: Mary Buckley

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1997-07-13

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0521565308

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This volume is the first to to take a systematic look at the position of women in the post-Soviet states of the former USSR.

Everyday Life in Central Asia
Everyday Life in Central Asia

Author: Jeff Sahadeo

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2007-07-12

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780253219046

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For its citizens, contemporary Central Asia is a land of great promise and peril. While the end of Soviet rule has opened new opportunities for social mobility and cultural expression, political and economic dynamics have also imposed severe hardships. In this lively volume, contributors from a variety of disciplines examine how ordinary Central Asians lead their lives and navigate shifting historical and political trends. Provocative stories of Turkmen nomads, Afghan villagers, Kazakh scientists, Kyrgyz border guards, a Tajik strongman, guardians of religious shrines in Uzbekistan, and other narratives illuminate important issues of gender, religion, power, culture, and wealth. A vibrant and dynamic world of life in urban neighborhoods and small villages, at weddings and celebrations, at classroom tables, and around dinner tables emerges from this introduction to a geopolitically strategic and culturally fascinating region.

The New Woman in Uzbekistan
The New Woman in Uzbekistan

Author: Marianne Kamp

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2011-10-01

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0295802472

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Winner of the Association of Women in Slavic Studies Heldt Prize Winner of the Central Eurasian Studies Society History and Humanities Book Award Honorable mention for the W. Bruce Lincoln Prize Book Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) This groundbreaking work in women's history explores the lives of Uzbek women, in their own voices and words, before and after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Drawing upon their oral histories and writings, Marianne Kamp reexamines the Soviet Hujum, the 1927 campaign in Soviet Central Asia to encourage mass unveiling as a path to social and intellectual "liberation." This engaging examination of changing Uzbek ideas about women in the early twentieth century reveals the complexities of a volatile time: why some Uzbek women chose to unveil, why many were forcibly unveiled, why a campaign for unveiling triggered massive violence against women, and how the national memory of this pivotal event remains contested today.

Muslim Women of the Fergana Valley
Muslim Women of the Fergana Valley

Author: Vladimir Nalivkin

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2016-07-04

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0253021499

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Muslim Women of the Fergana Valley is the first English translation of an important 19th-century Russian text describing everyday life in Uzbek communities. Vladimir and Maria Nalivkin were Russians who settled in a "Sart" village in 1878, in a territory newly conquered by the Russian Empire. During their six years in Nanay, Maria Nalivkina learned the local language, befriended her neighbors, and wrote observations about their lives from birth to death. Together, Maria and Vladimir published this account, which met with great acclaim from Russia's Imperial Geographic Society and among Orientalists internationally. While they recognized that Islam shaped social attitudes, the Nalivkins never relied on common stereotypes about the "plight" of Muslim women. The Fergana Valley women of their ethnographic portrait emerge as lively, hard-working, clever, and able to navigate the cultural challenges of early Russian colonialism. Rich with social and cultural detail of a sort not available in other kinds of historical sources, this work offers rare insight into life in rural Central Asia and serves as an instructive example of the genre of ethnographic writing that was emerging at the time. Annotations by the translators and an editor's introduction by Marianne Kamp help contemporary readers understand the Nalivkins' work in context.

Islam, Society, and Politics in Central Asia
Islam, Society, and Politics in Central Asia

Author: Pauline Jones

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2017-07-20

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 0822981963

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During the 1990s, there was a general consensus that Central Asia was witnessing an Islamic revival after independence, and that this occurrence would follow similar events throughout the Islamic world in the prior two decades, which had negative effects on both social and political development. Twenty years later, we are still struggling to fully understand the transformation of Islam in a region that's evolved through a complex and dynamic process, involving diversity in belief and practice, religious authority, and political intervention. This volume seeks to shed light on these crucial questions by bringing together an international group of scholars to offer a fresh perspective on Central Asian states and societies. The chapters provide analysis through four distinct categories: the everyday practice of Islam across local communities; state policies toward Islam, focusing on attempts to regulate public and private practice through cultural, legal, and political institutions and how these differ from Soviet policies; how religious actors influence communities in the practice of Islam, state policies towards the religion, and subsequent communal responses to state regulations; and how knowledge of and interaction with the larger Islamic world is shaping Central Asia's current Islamic revival and state responses. The contributors, a multidisciplinary and international group of leading scholars, develop fresh insights that both corroborate and contradict findings from previous research, while also highlighting the problem of making any generalizations about Islam in individual states or the region. As such, this volume provides new and impactful analysis for scholars, students, and policy makers concerned with Central Asia.