Gender Equality and Action Strategies in Mainland China——Some Reflections in Recent Years

Discussions about campaign strategies have been happening all the time, but limited by security risks, the scope of participation has been limited to more trusted partners in the community. But year after year, because of new laws, because of economic difficulties, and because of the high pressure of political control, more and more partners who used to be or can be called "engaged in gender-related occupations full-time" are forced to change careers, "strategies" The discussion of this matter began to look extravagant, and everyone half-jokingly and half-seriously believed: "As long as survival is justice."

Another reason why discussions about strategy are shy is the “anti-narrative anxiety” that many community partners harbor. The development of issues, community development, and cooperation around individual cases, etc., all measures seem so fragmented and random, and even the sustainability of a certain action depends entirely on when the hammer of power falls—trying to Drawing out a strategy from it seems to require a domineering structuring ability: the speaker inevitably classifies, summarizes, and even ranks the different subjects in the movement. This is a discussion that implies hierarchy. How to use this set of ideas to enter the territory of the feminist movement?

Narrative difficulties and contradictions deserve a separate discussion. As for the question mentioned in the abstract: "How to continue the vitality and effectiveness of the gender movement."——This essay does not attempt to propose a complete strategy or conclusion. However, it is related to the definition of the scope of the discussion, so it is still necessary to say a paragraph or two before the main text.

This article originally had an established reader portrait. Although the colleagues and teachers who have read the draft in advance are basically full-time actors (career activists) in NGOs, institutions, or various market entities, since the article is published, I actually want to discuss it with non-professional partners: After all, full-time activist communities are becoming rarer and rarer, so if you are confused or aspiring to the question of "how can I get involved in gender activism" in the broadest sense, both at work and outside of work time, and have (even if Extreme or depoliticized) practical engagement partner, I would like to share with you the difficulties from the gender industry and ask for your feedback.

For a definition of "gender industry" see my Women's Day podcast on The Stranger Things

Next is the main body of the article. I will use the dichotomous structure of "status" and "impact" to discuss the three obstacles I have seen in recent years. The "Current" section will attempt to outline the key qualities of the current situation; the "Impact" section will attempt to give evidence of the urgency of the stated issues.

One: It is difficult to have a cross-border connection between actors

status quo

This is perhaps the main dilemma. The so-called "cross-border connection" may have two meanings. One is the intersectionality of issues, such as gender and labor, gender and the environment, etc.; the other is the leap, empathy and unity between actors. From a macro perspective, the cooperation between the government and the people is an example; more commonly, multiple subjects with different missions in the civil ecology find common interests in a certain aspect of gender action, and thus cooperate to promote change. The media The cooperation between the world and the NGO industry is a typical example.

This article focuses on the latter, the relationship between actors. Standing in the middle of 2023, it may be relatively easy to reach such a conclusion: If the promulgation of the "Anti-Domestic Violence Law" (2015)—a legislative feat of bottom-up, political and social cooperation—is one of the Therefore, marking feminist action as a strong evidence of social movement, it may be difficult to see such a cross-border connection in the current action ecology.

• From a “government-civilian” perspective:
  For example, the recent revision of the "Women's Rights and Interests Protection Law", the legislative research and demonstration of the "Shanghai Gender Equality Promotion Regulations"; or the latest round of review of international regulations such as CEDAW "Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women"; or the national Standards and industry standards, such as professional anti-sexual harassment practical issues (led by the Women's Federation), and all participation thresholds related to national administration, legislation, and law interpretation have been raised repeatedly. , Fuyuanhui), and other participants no longer have the basis for equal dialogue with the Legislative Affairs Committee of the National People's Congress or relevant real power units.

• And then to the public level:
  The situation here is a bit more complicated: if we say that the gender public opinion ecology before 2018 was dominated by a very small number of gender NGOs, media and academic communities; then after 2018, gender issues seem to be pushed into the attention economy upstream, but this does not mean that many cross-border connections with social change value have been produced in the process. More details about folk gender ecology can be left to the third chapter below.

Switching to the perspective of events, the Fengxian incident seems to have triggered a mutual dialogue from self-media to professional media and finally to administrative units. However, the cross-border connection at the event level needs to be based on a minimum level of factual transparency, and at least make People see the different contributions of the participants. Cases such as the Huang Jing case in 2003, and even the 2013 Hainan Wanning case of sexually assaulting a young girl by an official, can be said to have "more causes and consequences" than those in Feng County. What Feng County has left us, apart from the far from complete picture of the facts and the unknown circumstances of the parties involved, is probably more traumatic memory based on gender (in terms of legislative promotion, we can also use the newly revised anti-trafficking law of the "Women's Protection Law" regulations count).

Metoo is a situation that deserves additional discussion. As supporters of the #MeToo movement, we have seen and participated in the support of individual voices and courage. From the perspective of the gender industry, we should also question and take responsibility for the lack of a sustainable action link for the #MeToo movement in mainland China . The so-called sustainable chain of action points to the question of “who will respond to sexual harassment continuously and professionally” (the reason why this question can arise just proves that cross-border connections are disappearing)——In the United States, from 2016 to In 2022, there will be as many as 3,000 state and federal bills related to #MeToo; in Spain, Congress passed the "Only Yes means Yes" sexual consent law... But in China, the legal, academic, business, and NGO circles, in addition to rushing to What kind of institutional response should be made to the emergency declaration of self-protection?

This is not to say that results must be used as a measurement indicator, but the process of crossing borders is undoubtedly gradually retreating: from the joint signature and petition actions of various universities in 2018 to 2022, except for a few cases , in the limited peer exchanges I have participated in, I have not even seen many innovative solutions. Even if some teams still have the resources and channels to enter organizations with a scale of 10,000 people to carry out anti-sexual harassment training, they still use 2018 or even earlier training regimes. This involves the inheritance of professional competence, which will be discussed in detail in Chapter Two below.

Influence

The reason why cross-border connection is important is that it is one of the important prerequisites for removing other obstacles. The history of local activism has shown us that connection is the starting point for the inheritance of people and methods —from the "photosynthesis camp" in the form of training (where many activist partners started), Gender as a community and Development Network (the birth and operation of GAD was once the driving factor for the confidence of the 1995 World Women's Conference generation in the linkage between politics and society), "feminist schools" based on knowledge and methods (and various "camps" of similar nature , can be compared to Wang Zheng’s Gender Training Camp ), and other similar cases have repeatedly told us that bringing together people from different backgrounds is a priori condition for change to occur and continue to occur.

However, the current gender industry has stepped into an obvious "separate strategy" survival path:

• NGOs living in the cracks are busy integrating into the rhetoric system of foundations or government purchasing services;

• In the business environment, communities with DEI and other similar banners completely lack the value recognition of gender equality. Most of them can only start from the traditional human resources system and use "organizing activities" as a method to scratch the surface of gender injustice;

• In the government-women's federation field, change itself was divided into three distinct routes:

  • The first thing to bear the brunt is the theoretical construction of the "socialist women's development path with Chinese characteristics", and all the work arrangements that have been extended since then, including family education, family tradition building, community participation, women's party building, and care for women and children;

  • The second is the political, cultural and economic work that is located outside the big talk of "women's development", or it can be called "accompanying": such as organizing women to visit revolutionary bases, women's emotional health and mood management, cultural and artistic activities, etc.— The above two lines are the necessary scripts for the Women’s Federation under the current political system: it is impossible to do without them, but as for how to promote gender equality, the logical connection between them is not obvious.

  • Finally, there is still a considerable community of activists in the system. They are either descended from the generation of the World Women's Conference in 1995, or through the internal resources of the Women's Federation (such as the early years of the Women's Federation's internal magazine "Unfinalized", or some of the resources of the Women's Federation's learning system, For example, the writings of modern women revolutionaries such as Liu Wang Liming) have their own system of action (the "Zhoushan Village Project" is a model of this). Those within the system who walk on the last path are the practitioners who are closest to "promoting gender equality" ( but if the former two do not absorb political pressure, there may not be room for the latter to survive ), but they are also the least motivated. Existence known to the international community (except some NGO networks), academic research, and journalism.

In the early years (1995-2013) of the above-mentioned three fields, there was no lack of cross-border cooperation and communication. However , the pressure of political control, differences in action strategies, and dislocation of discourse systems caused each field to make its own strategy, so the profession could not be circulated. , Information cannot be disseminated, manpower is unsustainable, everyone can only take care of themselves on their own channels: NGOs are busy coping with the shortage of resources, actors in enterprises are busy dealing with commercial interests , and personnel in the system are torn between administration and action.

Finally, there is a connection to avoid tearing the action narrative. Although it has happened in Britain and the United States, the current local feminist ecology in mainland China is shrouded in an extremely paradoxical and fragmented community relationship: the new generation of individuals on Douban, Weibo, and Xiaohongshu are self-contained; The activist community is developing rapidly, but it is helpless to have in-depth cooperation with domestic local actors; domestic actors are subject to media scrutiny and have nowhere to advocate their own narratives. However, the stakeholders around them are constantly being influenced by all kinds of strange new discourse techniques, so that the cost of explaining actions is getting higher and higher, and the actors themselves are in an increasingly absurd discourse field (quote from D: "I am Why do you spend time explaining your relationship with foreign forces when you do sex education popularization?").

Two: It is difficult to have intergenerational inheritance among the methods of action

status quo

Intermittent approaches to action are perhaps the barriers full-time activists most sympathize with. Since the Fengxian incident was exposed, all the media and experts in the field have missed a question (or have been unable to speak up): Where have all the professional capabilities China accumulated in the anti-trafficking campaign around 2008 gone? Of course, Wang Xiangni , who worked on the Mekong Anti-Trafficking Project, was selected as a Ginkgo partner in 2022, which means that there are still teams in the industry that pay attention to feedback and recognition of professional capabilities. But there are a lot of similar questions that can be asked:

• The one-stop anti-domestic violence model that has been explored around 2010, how many organizations and manpower are left to continue to do it?

• Why can’t the local anti-domestic violence voluntary community develop on a large scale since 2015?

• The gender media public opinion training held in various places around 2012, which news organization can continue to hold it today?

• Since the rise of the #MeToo movement in 2018, why haven’t companies and organizations introduced the best measures that have been proven many times internationally, such as 5Ds bystander training and intervention steps for survivors of gender-based violence (such as RAINN’s TALK method)?

• In 2005, the "Gender Equality Policy Review" was written into the policy document. Apart from sporadic pilot practices, what is the next step?

• In 1995 or even earlier, there was no shortage of gender communities in mainland China, but if you want to start a community from scratch in 2023, it seems that you can't find a reliable method and practical reference?

• In the early 20th century, equal pay for equal work sparked widespread local discussions, but now it seems to be a completely unfamiliar issue of Westernization? The design of the salary system is obviously a key part of human resources knowledge. How do business practitioners leak the idea of ​​equal pay for equal work?

This list of issues could go on and on, extending to all aspects of gender equality issues: microfinance for women, entrepreneurship for women, maternity leave for men and women, protection of transgender rights, support for single mother rights... Of course, the degree of expertise in similar topics means that they are difficult to obtain The public is concerned, but the crux of the problem is that, from the general public to key stakeholders inside and outside the industry, it seems that they have not realized that "gender also has a professional approach".

There may be three reasons for this situation.

• One is the lack of circulation of information. This reason has a high degree of overlap with the lack of cross-border communication mentioned above. For example, international best practices cannot enter, and the birth and circulation of domestic best practices (whether inside or outside the party) are too restricted. , etc. The specific card points will not be repeated.

• The second is the transformation of the paradigm of value. The gender industry in the new century was born in the ecological environment of the non-profit industry, starting from the Beijing Women's Conference in 1995. After the conference, the value paradigm of the industry is a rights-centered (rights-centered) growth doctrine that focuses on local roots, empowerment, and connections. "Professionalism" requires time, patience and tolerance, and is the result of continuous trial and error. From 1995 to 2013, the international foundations at the top of the industry knew this well. The cultivation of the gender industry was aimed at people themselves. Many projects were funded even without any mature evaluation framework in the early stage. With the knowledge and experience from the international community and the trust between the sisters, some efforts are slowly bearing fruit. Since 2014, the policy environment has changed every three days, and the value paradigm of the non-profit industry has also shifted to a welfare-centered developmentalism that focuses on efficiency and scale. The rise of new value paradigms is accompanied by policy innovation, political austerity, and the downturn of the international economic situation. International foundations cut off gender-funded departmental teams one after another. Government procurement services and local foundations have become an industrial value chain. Upstream of the gender industry, the stability of resource lobbying in the gender industry has disappeared, specialists have been forced to leave, professional organizations have been forced to transform, and professional methods have not been used; what’s more, industry actors sometimes have to retreat to the The starting point is to re-argument that gender equality is actually an issue worthy of funding to the new mainstream capital (eg domestic foundations).
  Outside the nonprofit industry, the value paradigm for explaining gender inequality in business has also undergone a shift.
  More rigorously speaking, the business field has not actually experienced subversive paradigm changes, because companies have no paradigms for social change at all-the corporate activist narratives that are available on the market (in the eyes of some scholars such as Carl Rhodes ) can hardly withstand scrutiny- —In short, companies have always aimed to make profits, but since the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, some more conscious companies have had to respond to the needs of the times and iteratively develop norms similar to DEI or Corporate Justice to hedge their social bad debts. But in the final analysis, these strategies are only passive defenses against social issues, rather than active attacks on structural difficulties.

• The third reason why the professional approach is unsustainable basically overlaps with the narrative breaks that will be highlighted below. One of the questions that deserves to be frank and honest is: to what extent does power inequality within the actor community stifle innovation and professional iteration? Who can judge what is professional? Who has the authority to formulate funding and evaluation criteria? Who is influencing or even defining higher-level meta-concepts, such as the interpretation of indicators such as "influence" and "effect"? The reason why these questions are generally difficult to ask is that when the entire action community is on the verge of extinction, it seems less "sisterly" to ask colleagues to introspect: everyone is so difficult, how can you talk about "professionalism"? Take the lead in waving the professional "flag", what kind of high ground do you want to occupy? ——The grassroots context of feminist action in China has always made the voice of "focusing on the profession" appear "elite" and "divorced from the masses", and it is suspected that it fits indistinctly with the "benefit-oriented" value paradigm that is more and more respected in the public welfare industry, while In the judgment of many, it is the latter that has suppressed the “rights advocacy” approach to feminist action, leaving many organizations without steady funding. This essay only marks the contradiction here, and will not elaborate further.

Influence

The impact of professional unsustainability is very intuitive. In summary, we must face the reality that there is a lack of solutions to gender inequality in mainland China.

"Lack of" does not mean "absent". Anti-domestic violence is a community achievement that many scholars and activists regard as a benchmark. But beyond that, the best practices we can look to are either too few in number or too tenuous in sustainability. From the latitude of actors, professional faults have obvious impacts on both the individual level and the team level.

• At the personal level, whether it is from the matching of "problem" and "solution" (Problem-Solution Fit) or the matching of "solution" and "market" (Product-Market Fit), the lack of professionalism will affect the problem response Almost every link of the action: how to analyze the needs and difficulties of the clients? How does solution ideation work? How should the effect evaluation be carried out? What could a good feminist project look like? Perhaps it is necessary to make a point, is the questioning method of these business regulations not friendly to advocacy-type feminist actions? The answer is yes. But this does not mean that “rights-based campaigns per se” have lost the soil to take root, and more importantly: the failure of gender-based campaigns in mainland China in terms of cross-border and professionalism has been serious enough to make us lose In addition to the perspective of exploration - "advocacy" also needs to change with the times, whether it is internationally such as the Canadian Women's Foundation, or domestically such as the Beijing Office of UN Women, "cost-effectiveness/impact" and "rights" ( rights-centered) binary opposition has long been a relic of the last century. In fact, there have been many innovative action paradigms that are actively combining the strengths of the two to cope with the global right-leaning social movement pattern. And this may be the personal, far-reaching and invisible impact of lack of professionalism on activists— our imagination is greatly limited —to mention "gender" + "students", in addition to sexual harassment prevention, it seems to be sanitary napkin action.
  Once again, I want to cautiously remind readers that this essay is written from an "industry perspective". I do not intend to criticize any specific projects or actions, but one of the obligations of an industry perspective is to keep asking more critically: Are we still How can more be done.

• The fragility of sustainability at the team level is the most visible difficulty. Feminist Voices had so many eye-catching action experiences back then, where is the knowledge and understanding in it now? Women in new media did so much multimedia training back then, where is the accumulated knowledge and experience now? A high school student wants to set up a gender community. Are there any suggestions, documents, templates, and rules passed down from the Pepper Tribe, Post-Growth Value, and CUHK Rainbow Group? All team building and development seem to have no "shoulder" to rely on, or a very high-cost "entry channel"-for example, you must first get to know the coordinator of the post-generation value before you can get dozens of experience documents, and this It may already be ideal for knowledge transfer.

Three: Between action narratives, it is difficult to have an opportunity for "asynchronous dialogue"

Influence

Regarding this topic, let’s talk about its impact first, so as to pave the way for readers to understand its urgency.

The question of why narrative divides hinder action itself is premised on the premise that in China (and perhaps globally as well), narrative is power.

Readers may be able to experience some clues from the following three scenarios (all real scenarios):

• The choice of narrative directly affects the strategy of feminist issues : the application of the rhetoric of "women's participation in politics" and the communist theme it calls are the feasible prerequisites for Chen Muhua to directly propose to the central government that "leading groups at all levels must have a female backbone" ; under the current 'women in governance' narrative, reforms that directly target gender quotas in the leadership team are hardly feasible.

• The division of narratives directly affects opportunities for cross-border cooperation : unless it is skillfully reconciled, it is unlikely that a company’s DEI business will directly cooperate with an NGO’s advocacy gender action; Various "she projects", "her public welfare", "she pilots", etc.) will not have a formal link with actions titled "feminism" (or even "gender").

• The division of narratives directly affects the gender awareness of general audiences, and further affects the degree of intervention on gender issues :

  • Example 1: Gender-related practitioners in the business world (HR, CSR, ESG, DEI practitioners with plain gender awareness, or female CEOs themselves) generally believe that the progress of gender equality in China is positive and positive. This is inseparable from the mass penetration of liberal feminism (or the more modest individualized narrative of "women can be anyone"). But the fact is that the female labor force participation rate in China is decreasing year by year , and the early and child marriage rates of women in underdeveloped areas are increasing year by year . The social cost of the three-year epidemic is borne by women. The findings are mixed – as the World Economic Forum points out , gender equality may be suffering the worst stagnation of the 21st century. But when the more powerful and resourceful middle class and elites in the workplace sink into individualistic Lean-In such as "I can have both a life and a career", "I can be promoted to this position", "I have never encountered sexual harassment", etc. In narratives, their positive contributions to gender equality will be minimal, and they will even run counter to ostensibly more radical ideas of social change out of self-preservation (eg "I'm not for women's rights. I'm an egalitarian." ).

  • Example 2: For the younger generation, the acquisition (or rejection) and discussion of gender awareness is completely separated from the narrative quadrant of gender action: arguing about "Jiancha" on Xiaohongshu, "transphobia" in the Douban group , Identifying "married donkeys" on Weibo, the new generation of gender vocabulary confuses the gender activist community - since 1995, the transgender group, married straight straight women have been key members of the feminist movement what? When is it time to start the discussion with "Identity Politics 101".

    What needs to be explained is that I do not agree to judge the newly created gender lexicon in a negative way; since it claims to be a feminist movement, it should not be presumed that the narrative center of gender issues must be actors community. The so-called "gender discussion in the new generation is not related to action narrative" is not to judge how "wrong" the discussion of new media is, on the contrary, today's activist community can no longer freely respond to changing gender issues. I remember that during a lecture, everyone was having a heated discussion, and a member suddenly asked sincerely, "How should we treat the marriage donkey?" I immediately felt that the other sister who was teaching together became nervous. Could it be that this is "Chinese characteristics" Feminist gaffe"? The division of narratives imposes a lot of unnecessary tension on cross-border alliances. Actors cannot participate in influencing the narratives, but they are the first to be affected.

status quo

Comparative analysis of gender language in social media fields (especially represented by Xiaohongshu, Weibo, and Douban), in the business field, or in the government-Women’s Federation discourse system is a huge knowledge project, far exceeding the scope of this essay. Pen force range. But in terms of the current status of gender narratives, we may be able to observe three distinct characteristics that run through gender discussions in various fields:

• There is a clear break between Chinese-language gender discussions and international theoretical frontiers.

I am not yet able to determine the specific impact of this feature on the activists. This assertion may also be prone to the danger of falling into the "center of Western theory". The following observation right will throw a brick for everyone:

Taking "liberalism" as an example, the view that "girls can be anyone" is almost the most frequent portrait of female bloggers in Xiaohongshu, and it is also a high-frequency theme of corporate DEI work in the direction of female empowerment. Feminist art exhibitions from grassroots to "canon" (from Liang Yu's exhibition to Guangzhou 0459 space exhibition to UCCA's exhibition with a more "art canon" background) are the most frequently discussed topics, but almost all discussions and reflections ( If there is any reflection) at most, it will go to "liberalism is not good" and "beware of neoliberal brainwashing". The relevant discussion is far less than the series of public writings by Li Sipan, Sun Jinyu and Dong Yige, and it seems to be in line with the international liberalism. Liberalist feminist writing is separated by a fundamentally different timeline. In China, it is rare to see any attention or response to liberal feminist discussions in the international academic circle (actually, the English academic circle), and it may also miss many recent debates and trends of thought.

• There is a serious mismatch in the lexical repertoire and conceptual genealogy of gender discussions in Chinese.

Gender vocabulary (lexicon) refers to the basic language unit composed of gender-related words, such as "women", "sex", "femininity", "feminism", "masculinity" and so on;

Gender genealogy refers to a series of connotations, temperaments, emotions, etc. that a specific vocabulary can conjure after going through the process of natural accumulation of history, active construction of users, passive influence of public opinion environment, etc. or external responses. For example, the word "feminism" can immediately sting the eyes of many straight men, which actually reflects that "feminism" has been imbued with some kind of intense and stimulating emotion in the pedigree of the Chinese context.

The so-called mismatch of vocabulary and genealogy is not uncommon in the history of feminist movements in various countries. For example, the word feminism also corresponds to a very complex emotional structure in the American feminist movement in the 1970s (Margaret Henderson and Anthea Taylor in the latest The issue of Signs reviewed the narrative controversy of the year through the play "Mrs. America"), but in the context of a well-functioning civil society, the mismatch of language pools and genealogy is a process product of various narratives competing with each other and continuously colliding , no one or force has the absolute right to interpret a word, the word gender was created as a grammatical state (gender was originally taken from genra, which means "category"), and it was adopted by Harvard University John Money was translated as "gender", then it was reconstructed by the theoretical circle to have a completely different meaning from "sex", then JW Scott extended "gender" into an analytical framework , and then queer theorists defined "gender" Injecting exponentially rich changes—in this process, "gender" has also been attacked by opposing forces . For example, Pope Francis once described "gender" as a "dangerous ideology", such as the world Reviews of gender teaching materials in various places... But in short, gender maintains the core characteristics of being a "process product", that is, "continuously shaped".

In contrast to the Chinese gender field, the review and deletion of public memory bear the brunt of limiting the historical accumulation of gender corpus. No matter how many times you (Voice of Feminism) have updated the pamphlet "ABC of Feminism", no matter how much you ("Women's Studies Seminar") use "feminist" language to detour, no matter how many times you (universities) Using the framework of "gender studies" to set the teaching agenda, the gender vocabulary in Chinese public opinion can only be a white paper full of wrinkles that is constantly being reset-"white paper" means that any students and the masses who want to get started with feminist thoughts are basically No reliable sources of information could be found; "wrinkles" refer to the mottled marks left by public texts after repeated erasure.

Therefore, netizens can hear about JK Rowling's "transphobia" and even express sympathy, but you basically don't read much reliable transgender theory popularization (the "Transgender Studies Quarterly" has been running for 10 years!); readers I am familiar with Chizuko Ueno's latest works, but the rich texts in the English world, from academics to public discussions, seem to be unable to "crossover". When it comes to misogyny, it is Ueno; , Speaking of others are Shen Yifei and Dai Jinhua...

Well, maybe I have to make the above statement again: this essay is completely lacking in criticizing the arguments from Ueno to Dai Jinhua, but only from the perspective of the gender industry, a good ecological development has to continue to reflect: why no one knows about Andrea Long Chu? Why are Sara Ahemd’s texts on In the Name of Love, Compliant and Living a Feminist Life so low in circulation? From publishing culture to individual public writing choices, what went wrong?

• There are still many narrative options that gender activism can mobilize

One Saturday night, I talked with my partners on the phone and talked about one of the difficulties in doing gender funding in Shanghai. After you open the application portal, most of the proposals you receive come from "non-gender specialized institutions". The business is brought into the field of community development and child protection by the main line of policy, but because every organization has more or less difficulties in survival, a common application strategy is constantly being staged in the industry: fine-tune the project narrative, put The beneficiary is rewritten as the object of concern of the funder (such as "women"), and is handed over to the funder for review to fight for funding opportunities for their own organization. The narratives of these projects basically do not see feminist working methods, but it does not prevent some teams from being highly professional. In a review process that targets comprehensive scoring, the competitive advantage may even be greater than the feminist rights favored by some traditional activists. planning. Feedback from partners: "So what? Why can't these organizations be included in the gender domain?"

The subtext here is similar to what a foundation chairman said after the recent batch of gender teams announced that they had ceased operations: "If you really want to survive, there is still a way."

What I would say is that there are still many narrative options that gender activism can mobilize. This may be one of the advantages of continuous activists. Your "ism and cleanliness" has been honed into a functional and instrumental prism between repeated actions: what opportunities are hidden in the chaos in front of you? ?

At the end of the meeting on Saturday night, the team talked about one of the urgent research questions: "How to mobilize sisters in the pan-feminist circle and promote them to become activists?" So far, the theoretical issues between narratives have actually undergone some practical transformation. . This reminds me of the insight of the teachers of the Women's Federation in the Zhoushan Village project in Henan: "We must theorize historical issues and technicalize theoretical issues."

This is not an opportunity.

epilogue

This essay stops at the problem and the current situation, which seems to be insufficient. However, as problems in the industry, cross-border connections , professional methods , and narrative intersections need to be deduced to solutions, and they need to diverge first and then converge. This prose is written here first, leaving room for the imagination of the solution. Around September or October, I will update my own actions from this year.