Short Abstract

Amid rising patriarchy, nationalism, digital surveillance, and social divides, feminist practices in Asia offer vital sites of resistance and meaning-making. This panel examines how diverse actors across the region negotiate and reshape power through everyday, online, and hybrid feminist practices.

Long Abstract

In a world increasingly shaped by polarising forces—resurgent patriarchal norms, nationalist alignments, digital surveillance, and social fragmentation—feminist practices in Asia constitute important sites for contestation and creating meaningful lives. This panel explores how diverse actors across Asia define and enact feminist practices, navigating and transforming patriarchal structures in everyday life, online spaces, and hybrid forms. We focus on two interconnected dimensions: (1) the expansion of digital feminism—through group chats, social-media platforms, podcasts, hashtag rituals—and (2) feminism as a way of life in Asian contexts, including how solidarity, care, and resistance are re-imagined across national, religious, and racial boundaries.

We ask: How do diverse actors articulate feminism, womanhood, or sisterhood in contexts of patriarchal governance and/or digital surveillance? How do they devise strategies to foster meaningful life and emergent communities under conditions of polarization and ideological constraint? What role do online/offline practices play in sustaining social bonds, care networks, and feminist archives? And what methodological and ethical challenges arise for anthropologists studying such processes—especially in surveilled, authoritarian, or digitally mediated settings.

We invite ethnographically rich contributions that engage digital and embodied forms of feminist praxis in Asia—examining how plural feminisms open new possibilities in a polarised world and how anthropological research might help trace, translate, and enact these possibilities.

This Panel has 5 pending paper proposals.
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