Kamazhay Bermagambetova, “Liberatory Practices as Oppression: Why Parents Are Obsessed with the Queer Community in Kazakhstan”
In many countries, same-sex marriage remains illegal, yet queer communities continue to exist and fight for their basic rights, including the right to safety and visibility. In Kazakhstan, queer discourse was relatively present from the country’s independence through the early 2000s. However, in recent years, discussions of queerness have become increasingly taboo. Although there is no law explicitly criminalizing queer identities, anti-queer sentiment has intensified, driven in part by organized parent groups who claim that queerness is a “Western phenomenon.” These groups have systematically targeted and threatened queer individuals, framing queerness as a danger to Kazakh children and society.
Under the pretext of "protecting children from perversion," these parent groups have aggressively opposed new legislation aimed at addressing domestic violence, claiming that the law will undermine traditional family structures and leave children without parental guidance. This opposition reveals a paradox: while advocating for the "protection" of children from queer influence, these groups simultaneously defend forms of domestic violence, which have historically been normalized in Soviet and post-Soviet contexts. The conflict highlights a troubling contradiction in Kazakh society's stance on child welfare—a clash between an alleged moral imperative to shield children from queerness and an enduring tolerance for family violence.
This paper examines how these so-called “protective” practices mask an underlying resistance to progressive change and seek to scapegoat the queer community as a means of preserving authoritarian family structures. This analysis questions the true motives of ‘protecting the family’ and explores how the queer community in Kazakhstan has become a scapegoat in debates around children’s rights and domestic violence.
Miranda Dotson, “Gender Heritage: The Organization of Labor in Nonbinary Households”
At a time when diverse expression and identity configurations gain visibility and acceptance, little is understood about the influence of such gender configurations on social interactions within interpersonal relationships. To explore this question, my ethnography focuses on the organization of domestic labor and care work in households where at least one romantic partner identifies as non-binary. This paper combines data from in-depth interviews and field notes from non-participant observation from at least twenty diversely-configured households (n=45) across the United States to understand how nonbinary identity does (or does not) affect the organization of household labor. Preliminary findings suggest that it is the gender heritage of all partners that exerts the greatest influence on the distribution of household and care labor. Specifically, partners assigned female in relationships with partners assigned male (who are not transfeminine) are more likely to take on the cognitive labor in the maintenance of their household and relationship. This finding challenges the assumption that non-binary identities pave a clear path toward interactions wherein one's experience is not shaped by assigned gender. Rather, it is the confluence of binary heritage and identity that best predicts the distribution of historically gendered burdens. Households where all partners have a relationship to feminization, either by way of assigned heritage or trans-femininity, are most likely to report evenly distributed experiences with cognitive labor. This research addresses the persistence of gender-binary inequity, the extent that it is undermined by non-binary identities, and speaks to the broader question of how we get free.
Trung M. Nguyen, “Queering the Home & Care as Tactics for Environmental Crisis in Vietnam”
Lower-middle-class housing in Ho Chi Minh City is not the ideal accommodation for queer individuals in Vietnam, especially with the lack of personal space between family members due to the rising living cost in a post-colonial state. Utilizing the critical lens of autoethnography, the paper explores the author’s own journey of queer escapism to find hope to return to a house that is no longer the same: different boundaries yet wreaked with deterioration under the effect of the climate crisis. Constant and severe floods have led to inaccessibility to the toilet and hygiene-practicing space. Wielding concepts and theories from eco-feminist writers such as Dina Gilio-Whitaker and Jessica Hernandez, the author dissects the queer structure of their own “nuclear” family formation, troubling the easy contemporary understanding of the standard heterosexual Vietnamese family of two children, while facing such constant environmental threats of uninhabitable living space. At the center of critiques, the mother figure stands out as a survivor of various crises, family, gendered, and environmental, who keeps strategizing and reconstructing the family. Tapping in Patti Duncan’s work on motherhood in East/Southeast Asia, the paper maps out practices of hope and perseverance against the debilitating ecology of the Vietnamese governed state under the transnational context of the hierarchical global economy in relationship to consumerism and waste management. Lastly, there is a call for communal solutions where, in reality, it is the neighborhood that usually offers help, which complicates the issue of personal homes and undergirds the notion of collective hope in moments of crisis. Through that, the paper addresses how to center queer mode of families as praxis of care in the Global South communities where exacerbating climate crises threaten their livelihood & futures.
Speakers 
MA in Women's Studies, The University of Alabama
PhD, Northeastern University
PhD Candidate, Oregon State University
Sunday March 23, 2025 3:15pm - 4:30pm EDT
Room 141
Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02167
