Female Educators and Gendered Discourse of Nation Building in Uzbekistan

Abstract

After the collapse of the Soviet Union Uzbekistan as a young nation state had to build its own national identity and position itself between different discourses. On the one hand, it had the legacy of the Soviet Union as the majority of population expressed strong nostalgia for the past. On the other hand, Western liberal discourse penetrated the society through International Organizations. While the state ideology envisaged the reinvention of pre-Soviet Islamic traditions, the threat of Islamic extremism posed further contradictions to this rhetoric. The state had to define its position in relation to these various discourses. This thesis attempts to answer the question how the official discourse has dealt with the challenge of positioning itself between these competing discourses and how socially effective it is. Due to the fact gender plays a vital role in all of these discourses, I have focused on gender aspect of the nation building discourse. Using the method of Critical Discourse Analysis, I have scrutinized a wide range of textual material from textbooks and Presidential speeches to media to understand how Uzbek identity was constructed in nation-building. Interviews with teachers who are responsible for spreading national ideology were conducted to identify how the teachers position themselves towards the gender dimension of the discourse. The results show that in post-soviet Uzbekistan the “imagined community” of a nation was constructed on the basis of pubic men - private women binary that prescribed gendered roles for men and women. The binary on men and women created by the nation building discourse is more consistent and does not contain any ambiguities. However, the image of the life of women as tender mothers and happy wives does not correspond to everyday realities faced by women. The last finding shows that the official discourse is effective despite its ambivalences and contradictions.