Soviet in public, Azeri in private - Gender, Islam, and nationality in Soviet and post-Soviet Azerbaijan

This paper focuses on the intersection of gender, state socialism, nationality, and religion in the newly independent republic of Azerbaijan. It demonstrates that although Muslim Azeri women have accomplished an impressive level of emancipation, their overall status remains flawed with contradictions and duality. Similar to women of several other countries in the Muslim world confronting colonial domination or semicolonial intrusion, Azeri women's liberation has been held hostage to their assigned responsibility as the primary repositories of tradition, and ethnic and national identity. At the end, the gender dynamics of recent changes and the new search for national identity in the ethnically contested and war-stricken context of post-Soviet Azerbaijan is briefly explored.