Description
Environmental activism, along with other forms of civil activism, has undergone a drastic transformation in Hong Kong since 2019. Public protests have become significantly less accessible and activism increasingly takes on “non-confrontational” forms. Despite these shifts, recent scholarship has considerably attention on environmental movements and governance in Hong Kong such as land activism, rural activism, food activism, urban farming, and marine animal advocacy. However, existing scholarship rarely examines eco-activism in Hong Kong through a feminist lens. This absence reflects broader political and epistemological dynamics between feminism and environmentalism in both social movements and knowledge production, such as the disjuncture between feminist and ecological movements (MacGregor 2009), or the erasure of feminist contexts and politics in academic fields like environmental humanities (Hamilton and Neimanis 2018). This paper first explores overlooked feminist concepts and practices, including the circulation of ecofeminist ideas and their integration with peace, sustainability, and the livelihoods of working-class women through the works of Chan Shun-hing and others. Second, it develops the concept of slow activism to propose a feminist approach to social movements, one deeply connected to everyday life politics, which questions conventional definitions of activism as well as the suppression of it. Slowness offers an indeterminate temporality of resistance that problematizes both the narratives of progress embedded in development projects and the narratives of decline surrounding social movements in increasingly authoritarian contexts (Tan 2024).
Reference:
Hamilton, J. and Niemanis, A. (2018) ‘Composting feminisms and the environmental humanities’ Environmental Humanities 10(2):501-527.
MacGregor, S. (2009) ‘Natural allies, perennial foes? On the trajectories of feminist and green political thought’ Contemporary Political Theory, 8(3): 329-39.
Tan, J. (2024). ‘Slow resistance: Feminist and queer activism in ‘illiberal’ contexts’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494241286987
