Intimate geographies of virginal blood.

Abstract

Feminist scholars, activists, and artists have long addressed the topic of virginity and have dismantled it as a powerful, globally circulating, and gendered myth. It affects how many woman-identifying people experience how their bodies become (a)sexual. Centrally, the myth of virginity has been shown to be mobilized in support of colonial, ethnonationalist identity projects. In Kyrgyzstan, disciplining women through policing their sexual behavior co-constituted nation-building projects after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Drawing on data collected since 2017 (qualitative interviews in Bishkek and Osh and qualitative research on Instagram), I examine intimate geographies of the virginity myth in Kyrgyzstan. Building on geographic scholarship on intimacy and body parts, I discuss the ways in which virginal blood works both to submit to and to reclaim one's intimate body spaces and sexual practices. I argue that people affected by the virginity myth create the foundations for intimate justice in Kyrgyzstan. On the one hand, people are reclaiming authority over their intimate bodies through subverting sexist systems of sexual control and through expanding discursive horizons of virginity performances. On the other hand, activists on Instagram are supporting digital public spaces that allow to author virginal blood narratives and provide resources on intimate body knowledge. Analyzing the scalar doings of virginal blood, the paper contributes a case study on intimate justice and the geographies of the body in Kyrgyzstan. My analysis encourages further examination of the capacities of the body to better understand how certain body parts turn into key sites of (geo)political struggles and can transform them.