Being water: protest zines and the politics of care in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

During the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) protest, Hong Kong protesters invented, adapted, and deployed a variety of decentralized grassroots tactics of resistance. While understudied, the proliferation of protest zines during the Anti-ELAB movement contributed to an affective community among movement supporters and protesters, allowing them to engage in self- and communal care as they resisted state violence. We argue that protest zines foregrounded a grassroots community of care that encourages political change in the following ways: expand the emotional habitus among protesters and movement supporters to accommodate debilitating bad feelings; promote self-care and embodied emotional reflection as a form of resistance against state violence; contribute to voluntary kinship among protesters beyond the state-sanctioned nuclear family model; and articulate nuclear familial relations as a site of political resistance. By examining how protest zines articulate voluntary kinship among movement supporters, we illustrate how the zines challenge dominant paternalistic institutions to reimagine a more open political future.

KEYWORDS:

• Zines
• social movement
• Hong Kong
• care
• kinship
• print activism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 While the movement was initially triggered by the Extradition Bill that would allow Hong Kong’s Chief Executive to extradite anyone to mainland China without due legal processes, it turned into a broader call for democracy and police accountability.