Description
Recent years have seen the growing presence of feminist and queer activism across diasporic Chinese communities in Europe and North America. Distinct from previous forms of pro-democratic advocacy among the Chinese diaspora, these grassroots organizations are more explicitly aligned with broader progressive movements, including anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles, in both home and host societies. However, with a few exceptions, these emerging spaces of transnational activism and identity formation remain largely underexplored in academic research. Based on ethnographic research and our own (as scholar-activists) involvement in these movements, this paper aims to delineate how diaspora Chinese feminist and queer groups in the UK organize, negotiate their identities, and imagine transnational solidarity by creating what they call ‘a space of possibilities’. Inspired by the activists’ call for only ‘crossing, but also redrawing borders’, we theorize the creative resistance of transnational Chinese feminists as grassroots borderwork, drawing on their engagement with local migrant rights groups, the pro-Palestine solidarity movement, and solidarity with South Korean and Iranian women. By doing and undoing borders from below, these emergent forms of transnational solidarity highlight the interconnectedness of different terrains of injustice across assumed geopolitical boundaries and essentialist identities, staging a feminist and anti-colonial critique of oppressive binary structures in both ‘North’ and ‘South’, ‘China’ and ‘the West’. Recognising and articulating its political significance therefore contribute to recent contributions in postcolonial feminist scholarship, such as Tafakori (2021) on Iranian women’s campaigns, that underscore how transnational feminist solidarity could create new spaces of connection beyond binary frameworks, liberal moral geography, and state-centric geopolitical antagonism.
