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Paper short abstract

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.