News & Events

The Everyday Work of Feminism: Affective Maintenance in Contemporary China

Date: 28 October 2026 (Wednesday)

Time: 3.30 p.m. – 4.45 p.m. (HKT)

Speaker: Dr Anna ISKRA (Department of Applied Social Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)

Moderator: Prof. Jenny CHAN (Department of Applied Social Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)

Venue: Room BC305, PolyU

Registration link: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/r/RBHP1ypDi1

Abstract: Feminist scholarship has devoted substantial attention to the emergence of feminist consciousness, yet the work involved in sustaining it remains less explored. We introduce affective maintenance to conceptualise the emotional and relational labour that enables women to uphold feminist commitments within the gendered social environments they aim to transform. Based on ethnographic research with self-identified feminist women in urban China, this study shows that feminist awakening is only the beginning of an ongoing process. Sustaining feminist commitments involves revisiting everyday experiences, establishing emotional boundaries, choosing when and with whom to share one’s views, affirming one another, and creating spaces centred on women. Through these practices, participants negotiated competing demands in family life, intimate partnerships, workplaces and feminist circles, preserving both their critical perspectives and their sense of belonging. By examining how feminism endures in everyday life, we identify affective maintenance as an underrecognised form of political labour and a means of understanding how feminist consciousness is continually renewed. 

Biography: Dr Anna ISKRA is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. An anthropologist of contemporary China, she studies the intersections of mental health, therapeutic cultures, gender and emotional governance. Her multi-sited ethnographic research investigates how rapid social transformation reshapes experiences of distress, practices of care, family relationships and desires for personal change. Her current projects examine artificial intelligence in psychological support and emotional companionship, alongside the emotional and political dimensions of everyday feminist life in urban China. Her work has appeared in top journals including Signs, Ethos, China Information, Transcultural Psychiatry, Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, and Critical Asian Studies.  

Registration deadline: 1.00 p.m., 26 October 2026 (HKT)

Organiser: 
China and Global Development Network, Department of Applied Social Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Enquiry: [email protected]