Call for Abstracts – How to Give Birth to a Soviet Society? Reproductive Politics in Central Asian Societies

Although the USSR supported anti-imperialist movements internationally, its own imperial structure remained shaped by ethno-racial hierarchies throughout Soviet rule (Tlostanova 2010, Annus 2018, Gradskova 2019), which took the form of settler colonialism in Central Asia (Kassymbekova and Chokobaeva 2023). Researchers have shown how despite a discourse that celebrated the ‘Friendship of the Nations’, Central Asian lives were continuously considered as less valuable than Slavic lives. This hierarchy manifested in various key moments of Soviet history such as the Kazakh famine (1930-1933) (Sartbayeva Peleo 2018), the participation of Central Asians to the Second World War (Zharkynbayeva 2018), the atomic tests in Kazakhstan from 1949 to the 1980s (Kassenova 2022), or the racism experienced by Central Asians in Russia in the 1970s and 1980s (Sahadeo 2019). While this historical scholarship has made great advances in making these hierarchies visible, little is known about how reproductive politics in particular were tied to their production. Yet, understanding the history of reproductive politics in Central Asia is crucial, especially if we want to deepen our understanding of the relationship between women’s history and biopolitics in the Soviet empire. A focus on Central Asia, in particular, allows to expand broader research on reproductive politics, imperialism, and colonialism (Briggs 2002; Stoler 2013; Spensky 2015; Paris 2020) by examining an imperial formation that actively promoted women’s liberation and shaped global debates on gender, race and the condemnation of eugenics (Adams 1990; Krementsov 2011). This workshop aims to fill this gap on research on Soviet Central Asia, women’s history and reproductive policies by raising the following questions:

• Who is allowed and supported to give birth in Soviet Central Asia, and under what conditions? Who is not, and why?
• Which families are deemed worthy of existence, and which ones are not?

This workshop examines reproductive politics in Central Asia through three core themes, considering it both as a site for the production of social hierarchies and as a space for women’s agency.

 

Download the text in Kyrgyz and Russian.

 

1 | The Governance of Reproduction

The workshop aims to examine reproductive policies targeting Central Asian societies. The few existing studies on this theme indicate that these policies were closely linked to power relations between the imperial center and peripheral regions, as well as to the ethno-racial hierarchies that structured the Russian Empire. The available examples that we found include (but are not limited to) the promotion of the criminalization of homosexuality in Uzbekistan (Aripova 2022), debates on abortion in Kazakhstan in 1936 (Michaels 2001), the promotion of mixed marriages in the 1950s and 1960s (Edgar 2022), and the debate on Family Planning in Uzbekistan in the late 1980s (Watters 1990). Soviet scientists in Russia viewed sexualities in Central Asia and women’s reproductive and childcare practices as problematic (Healey 2021, Lovett 2023). Campaigns promoting birth control and practices of forced sterilizations are reported to have been allegedly implemented in Uzbekistan in the early 1980s (Blum 1993; Roche & Hohmann 2017:107). With a few exceptions (Watters 1990, Michaels 2003), research has largely focused on legislative changes or academic debates in Russia, often neglecting the knowledge production and implementation of reproductive policies within Central Asia. This workshop aims to understand how reproductive policies were implemented in Central Asia societies.

2 | Modernization Policies and Reproductive Health

The second focus of the workshop is on the entanglements between Soviet ‘modernization’ (implemented through economic, industrial, agricultural, and military policies) and their effects on Central Asian women’s reproductive health and children’s health. Soviet ‘modernization’ policies are often presented as progress for Central Asian women based on indicators such as education and participation in the labor market. However, Central Asian women were massively employed in low-skilled jobs in agriculture (Alimova 2007: 143, Behzadi & Direnberger 2020). The cultivation of cotton, tobacco, and opium (Pulatova & Ismailova 1986; Tabyshalieva 1998; Toichuyev 2020), alongside extractive industries—including gold, coal, uranium, copper, and antimony mining—and nuclear testing (Kassenova 2022), played a central role in sustaining the Soviet imperial center. These modernization policies caused severe long-term health issues for women and children, including cancers, anemia, congenital anomaly, infertility, and contaminated breast milk. Research connecting modernization policies, reproductive health, and social inequalities remains sparse. This workshop aims to map and historicize these links in diverse contexts of Central Asia and to address this issue: how do these modernization policies impact women’s lives? How were they debated or contested within the region in Central Asia?

3 | Women’s Experiences and Knowledge Production

Ultimately, this workshop situates the practices, experiences, and knowledge production of Central Asian women at the center of the history of reproductive politics within the Soviet empire. Most research on contraceptive access and use focuses on Russia (Claro 2019, Nakashi 2021). Although access to contraception was perceived as a significant improvement in women’s conditions in Central Asia, little is known about women’s experiences of contraceptives. What contraceptive methods did Central Asian women use? Under what conditions did they undergo abortions? How were women and sexual minorities able to form families despite the constraints they faced? How have these practices evolved during the different periods of the Soviet regime? By the late 1970s, a growing number of non-Slavic Central Asian women had begun access to positions at universities (Abman 2024), including gynecology and women’s history. What kind of knowledge did they produce on women’s reproductive health and family issues? This workshop aims to examine the diversity of women’s social positions and their experiences in terms of reproductive health and family formation.

This workshop will hence address the following themes:

• Knowledge production in Soviet Central Asia on demography, gynecology, sexuality, and women’s health
• Soviet state policies on family promotion, maternity leave, child care services, contraception, abortion, mixed marriage, and sex education
• Professional practices in the field of medicine, sexuality, psychology, child care services, family planning
• Impacts of Soviet modernization on women’s health and reproductive politics
• Women’s practices, experiences, and collective mobilizations
• Family making under constraints
• Soviet legacies and transformations of reproductive policies after the collapse of the Soviet Union

This workshop welcomes scholars in social sciences working on Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and on Central Asian diasporic communities living in Russia or elsewhere in the (former) USSR.

Submission Guidelines

Author(s): Please indicate your institution, discipline, and email
Abstract: 500 words including title, context, research question, methodology, main results, and selected bibliography.
Accepted languages: English, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Tajik, Russian

Timeline

• Submission deadline: December 18, 2025
• Notification of acceptance: January 16, 2026
• Event date: May 28, 2026

Organization and Contact

This workshop is organized by Dr. Lucia Direnberger, Senior Researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), French Institute for Central Asian Studies (IFEAC), as part of the ANR project EUGENE – Governing Humans, Controlling Reproduction: (Post)Colonial Trajectories of Eugenics, and in collaboration with IFEAC.

The event will be held in Bishkek or Paris. Travel expenses and accommodation will be provided for participants.

Contact email: lucia.direnberger@cnrs.fr

 

Bibliography

Abman, Z. (2024), Coerced liberation. Muslim women in Soviet Tajikistan, Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press.

Alimova, D. (2007), « L’évolution du statut de la femme dans l’Asie centrale : des djadids aux indépendances », in Fati, H. (ed.), Femmes d’Asie centrale. Genre et mutations dans les sociétés musulmanes soviétisées, Tashkent, Montreuil : IFEAC et Aux lieux d’être, p.129-149.

Annus, E. (2019), Soviet Postcolonial Studies. A View from the Western Borderlands, London: Routledge.

Adams, M.B. (1990), « Eugenics in Russia », in Adams, M.B. (ed.), The Welborn Science. Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia, New York & Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. 153-231.

Aripova, F. (2022), « Tracing the Effects of Soviet Gender and Sexual Politics in Central Asia », Central Asian Affairs, vol.9, n°2-4, p.208-234.

Behzadi, N. & Direnberger L. (2020), « Gender and ethnicity in the Soviet Muslim peripheries: a feminist postcolonial geography of women’s work in the Tajik SSR (1950–1991) », Central Asian Survey, 2020, 39 (2), p.202-219.

Blum A. (1993), « L’Asie centrale ex-soviétique, espace culturel et espace démographique », CEMOTI, n°16, pp. 335-349.

Briggs, L. (2002). Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press.

Claro, M. (2019), « Dénoncer les maltraitances gynécologiques en URSS : critique ordinaire des patientes et critique féministe (1979-1989) », Diogène, 267-268, p.289-208.

Edgar, A. (2022), Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples. Ethnic mixing in Soviet Central Asia, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London.

Epp, A. (2018), Soviet postcolonial studies. A view from Western Borderlands, Routledge, London and New York.

Gradskova, J. (2019), « A decolonial perspective. Writing the “Other” women into Soviet gender history », in Kulawik, T. & Kravchenko, Z. (eds.), Borderlands in European Gender Studies, p.108-125

Healey, D. (2021), « Sexology and the national Other in the Soviet Union », Twentieth Century Communism, 20, p.13-14.

Kassenova, T. (2022), Atomic Steppe. How Kazakhstan Gave up the Bomb, Standford: Standford University Press.

Kassymbekova, B. & Chokobaeva, A. (2023), « Expropriation, assimilation, elimination: Understanding Soviet Settler Colonialism », https://www.southsouthmovement.org/dialogues/expropriation-assimilation-elimination-understanding-soviet-settler-colonialism/

Krementsov, N. (2011), « From ‘Beastly Philosophy’ to Medical Genetics: Eugenics in Russia and the Soviet Union », Annals of Science, 68(1), p.61-92.

Lovett, J. (2023), « The Fate of the Nation: Population Politics in a Changing Soviet Union (1964-1991) », Nationalities Papers, 51(4): 888-907.

Michaels, P. A. (2001), « Motherhood, Patriotism, and Ethnicity: Soviet Kazakhstan and the 1936 Abortion Ban », Feminist studies, 27(2): 307-333.

Michaels, P. A. (2003), Curative Powers. Medicine and Empire in Stalin’s Central Asia, Pittsburg, University of Pittsburg.

Nakachi, M. (2021), Replacing the Dead. The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union, 2021, New York: Oxford University Press.

Paris, M. (2020) Nous qui versons la vie goutte à goutte. Féminismes, économie reproductive et pouvoir colonial à la Réunion, Dalloz, Paris.

Pulatova, M. T. & Ismailova (1986), T.D., « O detorodnoy funktsii kolkhoznits zanyatykh v khlopkovodstve », Zdravookhraneniye v Tadzhikistane, 202(1), p. 74-77

Roche, S. & Hohmann, S. (2017), « Between the Central Laws of Moscow and Local Particularity. The Reproduction of Subgroups in the South of Tajikistan », in Kreager, P. & Bochow, A. Fertility, conjuncture, difference. Anthropological to the Heterogeneity of Modern Fertily Declines, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, p.101-132.

Sahadeo, J. (2019), Voices from the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Tabyshalieva, A. (1998), Otrazhenie vo vremini (Zametki k istorii polozhenija zhenshchin Centralnoy Azii), Bishkek: Turar.

Toichuyev, R. (2020), « World’s largest stockpiles of toxic pesticides buried in Central Asia », https://dialogue.earth/en/pollution/buried-in-central-asia-worlds-largest-stockpiles-of-toxic-pesticides/

Tlostanova, M. (2010), Gender Epistemologies and Eurasian Borderlands, New York: Palgrave macmillan.

Watters, K. (1990), « The Current Family Planning Debate in Soviet Central Asia », Central Asian Survey, 9(1):75-86.

 

Front image: Zanoni Tojikistan, mars 1975, n°3 (414), back cover.

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