Time: 12:30 – 14:00

Venue: LG204, UG/F, Wen Lan Tang (WLS), CUHK

Speaker: Dr Anna Iskra, Research Assistant Professor, Department of Applied Social Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Moderator: Prof. Jing SONG, Associate Professor, Gender Studies Programme, CUHK; Associate Researcher (by courtesy), Shenzhen Research Institute, CUHK

Abstract:
While feminist scholarship has extensively examined how feminist consciousness emerges, considerably less attention has been paid to how it is sustained. We develop the concept of affective maintenance to describe the emotional and relational labor through which women preserve feminist commitments while remaining embedded in the gendered social worlds they seek to challenge. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among self-identified feminist women in urban China, this study showcases that feminist awakening does not itself secure enduring feminist commitments. Instead, persistence requires ongoing practices of reinterpretation, emotional boundary-making, selective disclosure, mutual affirmation, and the cultivation of women-centered spaces. These practices enabled participants to navigate tensions within families, intimate relationships, workplaces, and feminist communities without relinquishing either critical perspectives or social belonging. By shifting attention from feminist awakening to feminist persistence, we argue that affective maintenance constitutes an overlooked form of everyday political labor and provides a framework for understanding how feminist consciousness is reproduced over time.

Speaker’s Biography:
Dr Anna ISKRA is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She is an anthropologist whose research examines mental health, therapeutic cultures, gender, and the governance of emotion in contemporary China.
Drawing on multi-sited ethnography, she explores how rapid social change shapes psychological distress, care practices, family relations, and aspirations for personal transformation. Her current research focuses on artificial intelligence in mental-health support and emotional companionship, as well as the affective and political dimensions of feminist life in urban China.
Dr Iskra’s research has been published in top journals, including Signs, Ethos, China Information, Transcultural Psychiatry, Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, and Critical Asian Studies.

Language: English

Registration: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13740570