https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7938-3985
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ABSTRACT
The persistent accusations about the Internet’s role in spreading pro-gay attitudes, the prevalence of media censorship across Central Asia and activists’ frequent use of the Internet all raise important questions about online influence on public opinion regarding non-heterosexual people in Central Asia. So far, there is little research on the question of what impact the popularization of the Internet has on Central Asians’ tolerance toward queer people. The purpose of this study is to examine if and how people’s frequent exposure to information on their smartphone influences their opinion of LGBTQs in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. The research draws on the Asia Barometer Survey Wave 4 (2005) and the World Values Survey Wave 6 (2014) and Wave 7 (2022) country data files on Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Professor Cai Wilkinson and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and constructive feedback on earlier versions of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 I agree with previous studies of public opinion on sexual minorities (Winkler Citation2021) that the language used to identify sexual minorities can affect public perception of these individuals. For this reason, I use LGBTQ+, gay, homosexual, lesbian and queer interchangeably to avoid arbitrarily selecting an imprecise identifier.
2 In 2020, the World Value Survey Association (WVSA) collaborated for the first time with the Research Centre SHARQ/Oriens in Dushanbe. They jointly conducted the WVS Wave 7 in Tajikistan. Despite the WVSA’s clear instructions that all questions needed to be asked by the contracted partner institution, SHARQ/ORIENS did not include the WVSA’s questions about non-heterosexual people. In their Survey Methodology Report, the research institute explained its decision as follows: since public opinion regarding LGBTQ+ people ‘is extremely negative’ in Tajikistan, when asked about their attitudes toward non-heterosexuals, people either refuse to answer or completely withdraw from the interview.
3 While Tajikistan has softened its stance on censorship over survey studies during the last five years, Turkmenistan remains the only country where the implementation of the WVS wave has not been possible so far (Haerpfer and Kizilova Citation2020). Enquiring about Turkmen citizens’ attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people is even more difficult for foreign researchers because it is almost impossible for them to enter the country, not to mention conduct research, unless they are involved in oil and gas production, the export trade or belong to the diplomatic corps.
4 The majority of Tajiks and Turkmens who participated in the Asia Barometer Survey Wave 4 argued that homosexuality is never justified.
5 Even though Article 120 only outlaws sexual intercourse between men, lesbian, bisexual and trans* women face double stigmatization and oppression – both for their gender and sexual orientation – in Uzbekistan (ECOM Citation2022). To fulfil their duties as mothers and preservers of the Uzbek nation, LGBT women are often forced by their relatives to get married. Marriage becomes continuous abuse for LGBT women because it is very difficult for Uzbek women to file for divorce even if they are victims of domestic violence.
6 The only Disney movie heroines I could identify with were Esmeralda, a gipsy woman and protagonist in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), and Hua Mulan, a Chinese female warrior and protagonist in Mulan (1998), who were both outcasts in their own societies.
7 Karakalpakstan, Andijan, Bukhara, Jizzakh, Kashkadarya, Navoi, Namangan, Samarkand, Surhandarya, Syrdarya, Tashkent, Fergana, Horezm and Tashkent city.
8 According to Kseniya Kizilova, head of the WVSA, the survey was completed in August 2022. However, so far, the Uzbek state authorities have not permitted the local survey company to share their data with the WVSA. The WVSA was asked to wait for a few months as the situation may change (email conversation between the author and Kseniya Kizilova).
9 The resurgence of uyat in the twenty-first century has resulted in a form of moral policing, mostly imposed on women and non-binary people in Central Asia (Thibault and Caron Citation2022).
10 In this context, some research institutes’ use of local derivations of ‘homosexuality’ might have further contributed to biasing participants toward specific answers. For example, in contrast to the other opinion polling centres in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan that used the term gomosexualizm (the Kazakh and Kyrgyz term for ‘homosexuality’), the Ekspert fikri Centre for Social and Marketing Research translated homosexuality as besoqolbozlik (the Uzbek term for ‘relations with beardless boys’) in its WVS Wave 6 questionnaire for Uzbekistan. The use of besoqolbozlik is highly problematic because it implies that same-sex acts happen only between older men and underaged boys and therefore are paedophilic.
11 In the WVS Waves 6 and 7, respondents in Central Asia were asked if they consider themselves a religious person or not, independently of whether or not they attend religious services. Since the Asia Barometer Survey Wave 4 did not use the same questionnaire, the variable Religiosity could only be captured for 2011 and 2022.
12 According to Puar’s (Citation2007) theory of homonationalism, in (Western) Europe and the United States, homonationalist discourses have been used to mark the difference between the progressive, homotolerant West and the homophobic immigrant, specifically Muslim Other.