Negotiating feminism in political fields : feminist organisations in Singapore and Hong Kong

Abstract

The particularity of feminist organisational emergence and development in a given locality reflects the distinctive historical development and socio-political context in which feminist politics unfold, as well as the country-specific priorities and preferences of activists. This dissertation is a comparative analysis of feminist organisations in contemporary Singapore and Hong Kong. I examine the circumstances under which feminist organisational forms, rhetoric, and strategies come to be selected by activists in order to understand concretely the making of organisations within the same movement in two different socio-political environments. This dissertation reconceptualises the socio-political environment within which an organisation operates by drawing on Raka Ray's concept of political fields. A political field is a structured and socially constructed environment within which organisations are embedded and to which organisations constantly respond. In other words, organisations are not autonomous agents, but rather they inherit a field involving various social actors and their accompanying social relations. State leaders and bureaucracies, political parties, and social movement organisations are all social actors who connect to one another in various ways, and differ in their access to power. I discuss how political fields in Singapore and Hong Kong structure the organisational forms, rhetoric, and strategies of feminist organisations, as well as how activists understand and work around the political fields that their organisations inhabit by allying with some groups and not with others, by magnifying rhetoric around specific issues and downplaying others, and by advocating certain strategies and bypassing others. To broaden the concept of political fields, I also examine feminist agency as a collective process, rather than as an individual's agenda. I illustrate feminist agency as the ability to coordinate one's actions with others and against others, to monitor the simultaneous effects of one's own and others' activities, and to generate and sustain collective action in a political field. At the same time, I consider the collectively-produced differences in influence due to the power exercised by individual activists who occupy different positions in feminist organisations and social movement coalitions. In this way, I perceive feminist agency and political fields as simultaneously evolving and dialectically interacting phenomena. Hence, this dissertation builds on the foundations of a structural analysis, but also affords a meaningful analytical space for identifying the ways in which activists influence or alter the conditions for collective action, even as their own agencies are reformed through their participation in feminist activism.