In Search of Shelter: Precarity, Protest, and Pronatalism among Laboring Women in Kazakhstan

Abstract In 2019, near Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, five children perished in a house fire while their parents were away at night shift jobs. This widely-reported tragedy brought to light conflicting imperatives and highlighted the precarity of gendered productive and reproductive labor across Kazakhstan. This highly-publicized incident ignited a conflagration of protests by “mothers with many children” (mnogodetnye mamy, kopbala analar), the official designation for low-income women who have four or more children and are eligible for state support. This paper analyzes the mothers’ protests of 2019, and the public and official responses to these protests. It finds that, by centering motherhood and traditional gender norms in their protests, these protestors successfully linked their demands for social benefits back to historic Soviet-era protectionist and paternalist policies, thus legitimizing their demands. However, the article argues that at the same time these gendered labor norms force women, especially marginalized mothers, to engage in precarious forms of labor that neither Western-style NGOs nor limited government support are able to adequately address. The article further concludes that “mothers with many children” labor under precarious conditions and are subject to skepticism and censure, as their actions challenge idealized national scripts of proper womanhood in Kazakhstan. This research contributes to the study of labor, gender, and reproduction in Central Asia and calls for centering the study of gendered labor precarity within Central Asian studies.