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Paper long abstract

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.