Fisher Fellow Talk: Mia Hanson, "Loose' Girls or Victims of the Feudal Past?: Underaged Marriage of Russian, Kazakh, and Uyghur Adolescent Girls in Post-Stalinist Kazakhstan"

This talk will focus on the interpretation and treatment of cases of underaged marriage in post-Stalinist Kazakhstan. Russian, Kazakh, and Uyghur girls’ behavior, agency, and victimhood status differed in public state media coverage, local insitutional response, and community reactions. These situations and their responses reflect how contradictory Soviet gender policy, and the anxieties surrounding adolescent sexuality that crossed boundaries of national identity in the USSR resulted in vastly different lived experiences for young women in Soviet Kazakhstan.

About the speaker:

Mia Hanson is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Pittsburgh. Her dissertation project explores how the state interpreted national differences in gendered practices, identities, and policies, and how state institutions, like women’s councils, people’s courts, and schools, enforced gender policy across nationalities. It also seeks to understand how men and women of different nationalities navigated these institutions and appropriated official discourses on gender and the family, and how the differences in official discourse by nationality affected understandings of Soviet womanhood or manhood for different national communities.