Decolonising gender in Uzbekistan: Family narratives and Suzani Feminism as epistemic resistance

Abstract

Gender narratives in Central Asia have long been shaped by Soviet modernisation projects and Western feminist paradigms, often sidelining local epistemologies and women's lived experiences. Drawing on a multigenerational family archive of handwritten diaries and oral recordings spanning the pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-independence periods, including materials from my own maternal lineage, this article traces how cultural memory and situated knowledge persist across generations. It analyses how women documented and interpreted social change through everyday practices and personal writings that remained largely outside official archives. I argue that these materials constitute important sites of feminist knowledge production, not because they articulate explicit feminist claims but because they transmit values, practices and forms of agency that shape women's lives over time. By foregrounding family archives and embodied memory as methodological tools, I introduce Suzani Feminism as an interpretive framework for understanding feminist knowledge as relational and context specific. Inspired by the Central Asian embroidered textile tradition of suzani, where patterns emerge through the gradual interweaving of threads, this framework reads women's lives as assemblages of intergenerational memory and practice. Moving beyond binaries of tradition and emancipation, I offer a situated account of agency grounded in everyday archives and locally embedded forms of feminist knowledge.