Feminist Activism in the Post-2010s Sinosphere: Identifying Issues, Sharing Knowledge, Building Movements

https://hu-berlin.zoom-x.de/j/61485852898?pwd=fpQpvmsjen4unCMWPaU2zfc0SIf8d5.1

Feminist Activism in the Post-2010s Sinosphere, a recently published anthology edited by Elisabeth Lund Eengebretsen and Jinyan Zeng, explores the vibrancy and complexity of feminist activism across the Sinosphere in the Xi era. The book brings together scholars and scholar-activists to examine urgent issues such as the #MeToo movement, digital feminist mobilizations, online misogyny, and the lived experiences of queer, trans, and ethnic minority communities. 

The BCCN conversation with Engebretsen and Zeng delves into how feminist engagements in China and beyond reconfigure activism through art, media, and digital platforms. By reflecting on the global and academic context of undertaking this kind of research, Engebretsen and Zeng offer fresh insights into the possibilities and challenges of building solidarities and producing critical knowledge in the post-2010s Sinosphere and beyond.

Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen (she/they) is Professor of Gender Research in the Department of Media and Social Sciences, University of Stavanger, Norway. A trained anthropologist, sinologist and feminist and queer studies scholar, Engebretsen specializes in ethnographic analyses of gender and sexual diversities, intersectional inequalities, political activism and theory-building in the empirical contexts of China, East Asia, transnational cultures, and Nordic Europe. Recent and current work focus on Nordic and transnational anti-LGBTQ+ mobilizations, Pride politics and activist engagements, climate justice and lesbian and queer history. Most recently, Engebretsen co-edited the anthology Feminist Activism in the Post-2010s Sinosphere (Bloomsbury 2024; with Jinyan Zeng) and published a chapter on queer climate justice for the anthology Queer and Trans Life: Anthropological Futures (Berghahn 2025).

Dr. Jinyan Zeng 曾金燕 was born and raised as an ethnic Hakka in China. Since 2021, she has been affiliated with the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University, Sweden. She is a scholar, creative writer, and documentary filmmaker. She earned her PhD in Gender and Sexuality from The University of Hong Kong and subsequently held fellowships at Colby College in the United States (2017) and at the University of Haifa in Israel (2020). Her research focuses on gender and sexuality, culture and politics, intellectual identity and activism, and ethnicity, with an emphasis on the Chinese speaking world. Zeng authored Feminism and Genesis of Citizen Intelligentsia in China (2016), co-edited Feminist Activism in the Post-2010s Sinosphere (with Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen, 2024) and co-directed the documentary film Outcry and Whisper (2020, with Wen Hai and Trish McAdam). She has two forthcoming books: Structures of Affect: A Feminist Approach to China’s Political Culture (Bloomsbury) and Chinese Women Intellectuals (tentative title, Routledge).

Haiyan Huang is a cultural anthropologist and geographer. She/they currently works as a postdoc researcher in Urban Studies at Basel University, Switzerland. Before that, Haiyan did a PhD on queer politics in China at Ghent University, Belgium. The PhD project focused on the processes of everyday world-making as a way of queer organising. Carrying on the high interest in everydayness and non-confrontational politics, Haiyan now works in the ASPIRA project that explores aspirational urbanism and everyday city life in Hong Kong and Taipei.