Description
Violence against protestors in repressed and authoritarian states has always been found. How do female protestors and women’s organisations combat it during movement repression? This paper explores the case of how female protestors, women’s organisations, and affinity groups encountered physical and sexual violence in the anti-extradition movement in Hong Kong in 2019 by exchanging emotional resources. Violent actions by the Hong Kong Police Force have been criticised and traumatised protestors in the anti-extradition movement. The vulnerabilities of women in social movements lead the paper to focus on the human rights development of female protestors. This paper argues that female protestors and women’s organisations established an informal relationship network by exchanging emotional resources, i.e. mutual suffering experiences, and jointly engaging in protest events in the anti-extradition movement. Compared to rational and material resource exchange in social movement, this paper emphasises affective support, sympathy for victims of police brutality and sexual violence and a mutual-helping relationship between protestors, women’s organisations and affinity groups. They exchange emotional resources through interactions and relationship network construction to empower women and sustain the anti-extradition movement development. This paper acknowledges the borrowing of affective mobilisation as well as the empirical evidence from in-depth interviews and social network analysis to contribute to the literature debates on women’s political participation in the political arena.
