CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Batyrbek Kyzy, Aigerim |
|---|---|
| Title | Mindful Fitness and Mindful Women: The Role of Kyrgyz Female Influencers in Shaping Discourses of Femininity in Social Media |
| Summary | This thesis explores how Kyrgyz female influencers construct and market femininity through mindful fitness on Instagram. Based on digital ethnography and critical discourse analysis, the study analyzed Instagram content including posts, stories, reels, and highlights from five nano-influencers and one wellness community to understand how empowerment, health, and gender are narrated, visualized, and commodified. The research addresses three crucial questions: (1) How is femininity constructed and marketed in the context of mindful fitness? (2) What types of femininity are promoted? (3) How do class and ethnicity shape access to and representations within this space? The findings revealed how Kyrgyz social media influencers engage with global mindful discourses and adopt it to the local cultural context, showing empowerment through emotional discipline and body control. However, these narratives often align with neoliberal and postfeminist frameworks that individualize responsibility, depoliticize structural gender inequality, and privilege urban, Russian-speaking, middle-class women. Thus, mindful fitness becomes a field of both empowerment and exclusion of certain groups of women. While it offers embodied agency and localized expressions of care, it also reinforces class-based distinctions and aesthetic norms of ideal femininity while continuing the idea of patriarchy. The research argues that mindful fitness in Kyrgyzstan is not only about health, but a gendered, commodified, and cultural space where femininity is produced, controlled, and consumed. |
| Supervisor | Supervisor: Kristina Orszaghova, Second Reader: Jelena Petrovic |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/batyrbek_aigerim.pdf |
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