Unearthing gendered geographies of shame: spaces of shame and agency amongst women miners in Tajikistan

In Kante, a coal mining village in Tajikistan, villagers use local idioms of honour/shame, variably found in Muslim and Central Asian societies’ repertoires, to judge women miners’ work. In this article, I draw on the lived experiences of these women informal coal miners to unearth what I conceptualise as the gendered geographies of shame in this extractive landscape. I do so by tracing the connections between shame as a gendered/ing discourse, a social practice and embodied emotion that produces spaces, places and bodies, and notions of agency as developed by Muslim feminist scholars. The article draws on three ethnographic vignettes of women miners and the voices of other villagers to show that economic/environmental pressures drive women into spaces of shame organised around a hierarchy of shame, reflecting diverse intersectional gendered positions and embodied labours in this extractive landscape. Women miners, however, are not passive victims, but also transcend shame, exhibiting a nuanced form of agency, which contrasts with liberal notions of freedom/emancipation, and rather operates as a discreet and embodied capacity for action within structures of subordination (Mahmood Citation2011). Spaces of shame are also ambivalent and can become productive spaces where people saw the seeds for the transformation of gender norms. By developing these gendered geographies of shame, this article adds to our understanding of the complex intersectional dynamics in emerging extractive landscapes while grounding theorisations of Muslim women’s agency to a Central Asian context where practices of shame largely regulate social life.