Gender Nonconformity and Homosexuality in Kazakhstan’s Contemporary Visual Culture

Abstract

While gender binarism and heterosexual relations are widely present in traditional art spaces such as museums and art exhibitions in modern Kazakhstan, non-normative gender and sexual behavior can rarely be seen there. Artists who post their visual works in social media compensate for this lack of alternative depiction of gender and sexual minorities in the mainstream art spaces. However, these artists remain largely understudied in the academic literature on gender studies and visual culture in Central Asia. In this thesis, I contribute to this literature by studying the depiction of gender and sexual nonconforming people in contemporary visual culture in Kazakhstan’s social media. By analyzing the illustrations by three artists – Murat Dilmanov, Daniyar Sabitov, and Veronika Fonova – I demonstrate the spectrum of diverse representation of non-normative gender and sexual expression. First, I claim that Dilmanov’s political caricatures offer a simplified heteronormative depiction of gay and effeminate men. In order to show that the way the artist depicts queers in his illustrations are limited to a stereotypical image of gays, I use Bakhtin’s concept of monoglossia. Second, I show that, in his collages, Sabitov creates a utopian image of Kazakhstan where queers are well-integrated into a broader society; I explain his project by using Munoz’s concept of queer futurity. I argue that Sabitov’s collages, although offering a less stereotypical depiction of queer people, still imagine them within heteronormative and assimilationist realm. Third, I claim that Fonova is an artist who (contrary to Dilmanov and Sabitov) moves from a political and/or activist agenda and concentrates instead on the depiction of the private life of queer people. By focusing on their romantic life in the context of a daily routine, Fonova demonstrates the diversity of gender and sexual nonconformity as something that exists naturally. It exists not as part of political activism, but rather as something that is surrounded by what can be seen as queer boringness of everyday life. Thus, I show the progression of gender nonconforming and/or homosexual people’s depiction in visual culture of modern Kazakhstan moving from heteronormative stereotypical (Dilmanov) and assimilationist (Sabitov) to non-heteronormative (Fonova) rhetoric.