ABSTRACT
Kyrgyzstan has been implementing neoliberal policies for nearly three decades to facilitate the inflow of foreign capital, and establish the best ‘enabling environment’ for capital reproduction. Thirty years of neoliberal interventions have resulted in the commodification of land, labour, money and state services, expanding the logic of capital to spheres that were previously not considered for sale in the market. Many women, in particular, were harmed by the neoliberal commodification because it excluded their access to essential goods and services (such as housing and healthcare), and indebted them through microcredit lending. This chapter discusses how older working-class women have emerged as key political actors to limit and reverse the impact of market forces. Despite their structural disadvantage, they were able to have political effects, making them an important object of scholarly attention.
Drawing on primary data, this chapter offers a first-person account of older working-class women’s struggle for social welfare protection, an egalitarian allocation of land and housing, and better regulation of the financial industry. The theoretical toolbox of Polanyi, Bourdieu and Sayer highlights the significance of class inequality and class experiences for gendered politics. It contributes to the literature on post-Soviet politics by challenging elite-centred frameworks, which are dominant in the field but are inadequate to understand local movements, gendered activism and the state-society-capital complex.
