Precarious labor,affect,and intersectional inequalities: Working as feminist and LGBT NGO activist-workers in China

Abstract

The NGO sector is not only a contentious site in which global and national politics materializes, but also where precarity manifests itself unevenly in the gendered, racialized, and classed bodies that inhabit those spaces. In China, NGOs have become the major forms through which feminist and LGBT grassroots organizing take shape since the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. This paper examines how state repression and the neoliberal logics of professionalization within NGOization politicize and precaritize feminist and LGBT rights-based work. Building on critical scholarship bridging analysis of precarity as a labor condition with the notion of ontological precariousness, this paper explores how feminist and LGBT activist-workers in China negotiate labor/work along the hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, urbanity/rurality, and seniority. I argue that precarity is both material and affective, manifesting in the differential devaluation and exploitation of activist workers’ emotional and physical labor, particularly for those facing compounded forms of oppression due to their intersectional identities, as well as the silencing of difficult feelings by hierarchical relations within movement spaces. I suggest that the feelings that fuel the resistance—such as hope, desire, and camaraderie—often lead to structurally unrealizable aspirations and reproduce racial, class, and age disparities within NGOs. It produces unintended and contradictory affective consequences of mental fatigue, frustration, and feelings of betrayal that further perpetuate precarity. This paper contributes to advancing not only state-centered studies of feminist and LGBT activism but also global aid and development literature from perspectives of labor precarity, affect, and intersectionality.