Abstract
This paper seeks to deepen the understanding of gendered influencer cultures and the construction of women’s subjectivities through their relationships with religion, work, family, motherhood and the state. We situate our research in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan and study three most popular female influencers and their followers. We question existing dominant and universalist Western feminist frameworks (post-feminist and neoliberal) of reading women’s roles in influencer cultures and their imbrications in the market. Deploying theories of decoloniality and epistemic reconstitutions, this paper uncovers underlying forms of imperialism in knowledge construction. This epistemic reconstitution is necessitated by our respondents’ ambivalent identification and disidentification with feminism, which our respondents see as Western, neo-colonialist and imperialist. Instead, they choose to use the idea of the modern woman, which is a complex amalgam of their historical legacies and lived realities. Exploring modalities of border thinking, we analyse this category of the modern woman, to think beyond ideas of Anglo-American modernity to better understand the realities and aspirations of Kazakh women within influencer cultures. This paper reads this idea of ‘alternative modernity’ in the light of the construction of the ‘new woman’ in colonial India. To this end, the paper brings together the two discursive fields of post-colonialism and post-socialism to decolonize Western feminist theoretical paradigms of reading women dominated influencer cultures. Thus, this paper contributes to widening the notions of transnational intersectionality in constructions of gendered influencer culture.