Tracing the Effects of Soviet Gender and Sexual Politics in Central Asia

Abstract

By focusing on gender as an intersection of sexual ideologies and law, and analyzing its role in the transition between the Russian imperial colonial regime and the Bolshevik program of modernization in Central Asia, this article uncovers gendered and homophobic tropes associated with building an Uzbek Soviet and post-Soviet modernity. Coinciding with the women’s liberation campaign, the early criminalization of male same-sex practices in 1926 in the Uzbek Socialist Republic demonstrates a dual burden of Soviet modernity, whereby women’s emancipation came with the erasure of sexual ambivalence in the region and same-sex practices. The construction of a new historical memory that came with the emergence of the independent nation-state excludes women’s voices of the Soviet liberation campaign as well as renouncing its queer prerevolutionary past.