“Can you beat your wife, yes or no?”: a study of hegemonic femininity in Kazakhstan’s online discourses

ABSTRACT This study investigates how standards of hegemonic femininity in Kazakhstan are utilised by the public in online spaces to police Kazakh women’s bodies, glorify national culture, and normalise violence against women who do not conform to these standards. Drawing upon discourse analysis as the primary method for examining available comments on Facebook and Instagram, this paper is one of the first studies of modern Kazakh nationalism from a critical gendered perspective that situates discourses about Kazakh women in the context of sexual violence and demonstrates the “weaponisation” of women’s bodies and the normalisation of violence against them in online spaces.