ABSTRACT

In this chapter, the author is thinking with gender about local lifeways in Central Asia. Gender, an analytical concept produced elsewhere, helps to complicate existing analyses of human diversity in and history of the region. The chapter offers an overview of local gender order and its transformations, including its pre-colonial, colonial, Soviet and post-Soviet iterations. It also offers a thicker description and analysis of local complex and complicated lives by shedding light on regional gender variance (a range of behaviours associated with opposite sex) – one of the blind spots in the studies of Central Asians’ daily lives – and calls on other local and non-Central Asian scholars to join the conversation.