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Kyrgyzstan has become one of the most dangerous countries in Central Asia for women to live in. Under increasingly authoritarian conditions, young polyglot Kyrgyzstani women began to practice their feminist 'sisterhood' online, protesting against neo-traditional practices and crimes against women.

Paper long abstract

Kyrgyzstan has become one of the most dangerous countries in Central Asia for women to live in. Forced marriages, violence against women, and particularly femicides are well-known in the country and have been reported in critical media outlets. But as Kyrgyzstan’s authoritarian government increasingly tightens its grip on local media, the legal profession, and NGOs deemed influenced by 'outside forces', it has become harder for women to publicly raise their voices and inform each other of their rights in classical public settings. In consequence, critical forms of expression have moved to social media: On Instagram and YouTube especially, a new generation of women practice a form of digital feminist ‘sisterhood’ that combines explicit critique of the patriarchal state and of neo-traditional practices such as bride-kidnapping, by means of comedy, edutainment, and through their own music. They speak in a mix of Russian, Kyrgyz and English, reference internet memes in one, and Kyrgyz folk tales in the next sentence, scold their politicians, but embrace their country’s flag and thereby refuse easy categorization. While this form of digital sisterhood also draws on elderly women’s knowledge of feminist practice during Soviet times, it especially forges its own kind, adapted to the circumstances of the young women's own lives.

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This paper examines how “Dreaming Girls” in China use AI chat apps to form romantic relationships with virtual characters. Based on digital ethnography, it shows how AI transforms private fantasy into shared emotional and social practices, fostering new forms of intimacy and community.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the emergent and emotionally charged relationships between young Chinese women, known online as “Dreaming Girls” (梦女), and AI-powered virtual lovers. Drawing on twelve months of digital ethnography, including interviews, participant observation, and discourse analysis on Chinese social media platforms such as Rednote and Weibo, I examine how AI chat applications, like LoveyDovey, Character AI, and ChatGPT, are transforming solitary fantasy into an emotionally interactive space. These platforms allow users to co-create romantic relationships with fictional characters from anime, manga, and games (ACG), enabling the simulation of mutual affection, customized storylines, and real-time dialogue.

While the integration of AI is often associated with social isolation, Dreaming Girls demonstrate the opposite trend. AI agents have fostered new forms of social connection within this subculture. Many Dreaming Girls share their custom AI character models with one another, allowing others to bypass the labor of personalization and immediately engage with pre-configured virtual partners. These models become communal resources, further deepening emotional immersion. In addition, users frequently share romantic or disappointing experiences with AI in online forums, reflecting on moments of joy, sadness, or narrative surprise. These exchanges transform solitary experiences into communal storytelling. Emotions initially directed toward fictional partners are partially redirected into community relationships, fostering a collective space of empathy, reflection, and co-experience. AI, in this context, functions not only as a tool for fantasy but also as a social infrastructure, facilitating affective exchange, cultural production, and a shared sense of belonging.

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Digital affordances offer vital avenues for reinventing activities that are frequently seen as disruptive and ‘unfeminine’. This paper examines how digital forms of gambling enable women to negotiate with algorithms and enact ingenious household provisioning towards performing ‘good’ motherhood.

Paper long abstract

Feminist gambling scholarship has revealed that the discourse about women’s gambling remains dominated by patriarchal frameworks. Women gamblers are more likely to be portrayed as irresponsible parental figures than their male counterparts (Palmer du Preez et al. 2021). In the Philippines, how the liberalization of online gambling in the previous decade has democratized gambling accessibility for ordinary Filipinos, especially women, remains understudied. Yet it is this very liberalization that has exposed women gamblers to intense moralizing regulation, reproducing sexist norms while rendering invisible their agency. This paper interrogates the moralistic framing of women's gambling by examining it through the lens of working-class indigenous women in Southern Philippines. Drawing on two months of ethnographic fieldwork in Davao City, I demonstrate how online gambling in a context of economic precarity is reinvented from a potentially disruptive activity into one that is socially and economically generative. For the women of my research, gambling was perceived as a calculated activity through which they could enact ingenious household provisioning while fulfilling their caregiving responsibilities. I further argue that ‘algorithmic negotiation’—the deliberate sensing, testing, and timing of platform affordances—enables modes of self-regulation integral to maintaining respectability and resisting addiction. By negotiating with online gambling algorithms, my interlocutors creatively embodied and fulfilled the norms of ‘good’ motherhood. This contributes to a broader understanding of the anthropology of gambling in a polarized world by challenging dominant perspectives that pathologize gambling and theoretically integrating a feminist framework with the notion of algorithmic negotiation.

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This paper examines how Tibetan Buddhist nuns navigate encounters with Western feminist discourses through digital connectivity and transnational networks. Whilst younger nuns seek an own voice, they demonstrate cautious resistance to frameworks that do not emerge from their lived worlds.

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Examining Tibetan Buddhist nunneries in Nepal, this paper demonstrates how the binary of intra muros and extra muros – inside and outside monastic walls – has been fundamentally reconfigured through internet connectivity. A new generation of nuns increasingly engages with global discourses, yet their encounters with feminism reveal complex dynamics of translation, appropriation, and resistance.

Through ethnographic work in Nepalese exile communities, this paper explores how feminist discourses reach these often patriarchal religious institutions via Western and Southeast Asian visitors, benefactors, and digital platforms. These encounters frequently transmit Euroamerican feminist frameworks without adequate contextualisation for the specific social, religious, and political worlds nuns inhabit. Whilst some younger nuns express eagerness to participate in broader conversations about gender and agency, many demonstrate an internalised sensitivity – a kind of epistemic caution – that prevents them from connecting too readily with feminist vocabularies that feel externally imposed.

This paper asks: How do nuns navigate digital spaces whilst maintaining commitments to Buddhist values and community hierarchies? What happens when feminist solidarities cross cultural and religious boundaries without sufficient translation work? How might anthropologists trace these encounters ethically, particularly when our own analytical frameworks may replicate the very dynamics of epistemic violence we seek to critique?

By examining the gap between nuns' lived experiences and available theoretical tools, this paper considers how digital connectivity simultaneously opens possibilities for voice whilst potentially foreclosing others – revealing the tensions inherent in transnational feminist knowledge production in polarised times.

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This study employs textual analysis and interviews to examine how stand-up comedy in China becomes a site of feminist expression. It finds female comedians articulate gender inequality while being limited by monetization, producing an affective, banal feminism and outlining a made-in-China feminism.

Paper long abstract

In the contemporary cultural context of China, stand-up comedy has undergone a process of localization and transformation from a purely imported form of popular entertainment into an important cultural practice. From its early male-dominated tradition characterized by a strong sense of masculinity to the rise of female comedians and the emergence of gender discourse, stand-up comedy has gradually become a crucial cultural arena for feminist expression. Drawing on gender performativity as the theoretical framework, this study employs a methodology combining textual analysis with in-depth audience interviews. The findings reveal that early Chinese stand-up comedy inherited a discourse of “male humor,” marked by mockery, authority, and rationality, thereby reinforcing masculine hegemony. In contrast, contemporary female comedians use humor to articulate experiences of gender inequality, emotional repression, and identity dilemmas. However, their feminist expressions remain constrained by commercial imperatives and platform governance, which shape content boundaries and limit expressive autonomy.Meanwhile, stand-up comedy advocates a kind of original feminism under pervasive post-feminism media culture and penetrates softly into the lives of audiences, transforming feminism into an affective practice where the everyday and the political are intricately intertwined, which evokes emotional resonance and feminist awakening within an “intimate public sphere”. This paper explores media practices within China’s specific cultural and feminist contexts, revealing how feminism is produced, regulated, and perceived in highly commercialized and platform-based entertainment spaces, and clarifying the contours of a made-in-China feminism theory, thereby providing an important supplement from Chinese experience for understanding the localized and differentiated development of global feminism.

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Based on ethnographic fieldwork with young Chinese women during Covid-19, this paper examines everyday feminist aspirations for alternative ways of living in peripheral “utopian” spaces, and how longing, loss, and resistance emerged as pandemic surveillance and precarity intensified.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Southern China during the first fifteen months of the Covid-19 pandemic. It follows the lives of young Chinese women who migrated to Kunming, Dali, and Yangshuo—locations idealised as peripheral, “free,” or alternative spaces within contemporary China. These sites are imagined as places where different modes of living and being a woman might be possible, beyond patriarchal expectations of marriage, family obligation, and respectability.

The women I worked with were not part of a coherent feminist network and often did not know one another, yet they shared experiences of gendered frustration, disillusionment, and harm within familial, romantic, workplace, and social structures. Their feminist aspirations were articulated primarily through everyday practices—choices about work, mobility, intimacy, and community—rather than explicit political discourse, shaped by restrictions on feminist expression and activism in China.

The paper examines how these aspirations became constrained during the Covid-19 pandemic. Processes already underway in these sites—gentrification, social homogenisation, and expanding state presence through infrastructure and surveillance—were intensified by lockdowns, digital track-and-trace technologies, heightened policing, and employment precarity. As livelihoods narrowed and mobility was curtailed, women’s attempts to sustain alternative ways of living were marked by frustration, loss, and foreclosed possibility.

Focusing on affective experiences of longing and disillusionment, the paper argues that everyday feminist projects illuminate both the possibilities and limits of seeking feminist “utopias” under surveillance and patriarchal governance. It concludes with reflections on ethical and methodological challenges of conducting feminist ethnography in authoritarian settings.

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Researchers have remained constant interest in the topic of Chinese feminism and gender politics ever since the founding of PRC. Particularly in recent years, due to the ever repressed political climate, practicing street gender activism can trigger intense state censorship; therefore, more and more grassroots Chinese feminists have sought social media as alternative ways to express their gender dissent, which have attracted many scholarly attention, yet meanwhile, have also made the offline sphere of Chinese feminism less explored. Responding to this lack of attendance to the offline Chinese feminism, in this article, I will look rather into the everyday offline settings of Chinese feminism. By ethnographically observing two selected queer friendly feminist spaces in two Chinese cities, I hope to delineate how feminism embodies itself in everyday offline settings and how the process of feminism is practiced by grassroots queer feminists in their everyday urban lives. Following Hemmings’ “affective solidarity” (2012) critique and Ahmed’s argumentation of “feminist attachments” (2004), in this article, I argue to temporarily abandon the framework of feminist activism and adopt instead the one of feminist activities, in exploring the process of feminism and the process of becoming a feminist in everyday offline world. I propose to pause the “Chinese Feminism is dead” statement for the moment and chant instead “Let feminism cook” at current uneasy hours, so that the fluidity of feminist epistemology across time and space can be fully acknowledged.