Introduction

Ramona Vijeyarasa

Can a diversity of women find a way to come together in collective resistance to state oppression? When is a challenge sufficiently provocative to count as ‘disruption’? Moreover, in a context in which ‘solidarity’ is perhaps now a timeworn term but ‘disruption’ is a little too in vogue, how can we revisit and reconceptualise the role of women and their collectives in rising against the state?

The three chapters in this section present to readers the various struggles of women’s movements—from Japan, Hong Kong and Indonesia—in promoting feminist agendas and confronting patriarchal norms that continue to marginalise, exclude and oppress. The chapters have a common starting point: acknowledging the existence of a diversity and plurality of women’s groups participating in the struggles for change in Asia, whether they comprise missionaries or elites, marginalised or grassroots organisations or state-affiliated women’s groups. The task at hand is to find common ground in the pursuit of women’s rights and wellbeing.

Ruby Y.S. Lai takes us on a journey to Hong Kong. Set in the context of the political reintegration of Hong Kong into China, in Lai’s Chapter 12, we begin to understand the role of non–state-affiliated feminist activism in negotiating space with pro-China women’s rights groups. As Lai—a feminist scholar, journalist and sociologist—explains, many of these non–state-affiliated groups were forced to reposition themselves and develop new strategies in the face of political change. Hong Kong’s feminist activists offer the region lessons on how to allow a more conventional women’s rights agenda to persist alongside the pursuit of much more progressive discourses related to sexual rights and marginalised minority groups. The author lays on the table strategies that range from diversifying the agenda through to careful choices about when to ally with state agents and political parties.

In Chapter 13, Rachael Diprose, Bronwyn Anne Beech Jones and Ken M.P. Setiawan take us to village governance in Indonesia’s Gresik District as they urge us to move our focus away from more traditional forms of collective action such as electoral politics to more localised forms. Here, we see how solidarity in the form of grassroots women’s community organisations, known as Women’s Schools, can be a powerful way for individual women and their groups to obstruct and resist, particularly in the face of deeply entrenched cultural norms concerning women’s place in society at the village level. The Women’s Schools offer women who might otherwise be excluded from activism a platform for growing their power at this level.

Serena Eleonora Ford in Chapter 14 takes us to Japan, where the euphemistically named Technical Intern Training Program has seen the harrowing exploitation of migrant workers, largely but not only from Vietnam. Ford’s lens is one of ‘depletion through social reproduction’, helping readers to understand the ways in which these workers’ existence is drained through both inadequate help and wellbeing alongside little regard for the socially reproductive roles of these predominantly female workers, both in Japan and at home. While a more vocal opposition to the work program has existed for more than 30 years, Ford’s chapter turns to a softer coalition of activists based in Japan and in sending communities in their home country. Their contribution is to replenish and care and not necessarily demand an overhaul of the program itself. In notable parallels to Lai’s analysis of Hong Kong, again, we see division—between those who challenge and those who supplement—as Ford seeks to frame and understand how both can sit in solidarity and even amplify the cause.

Together, these three chapters offer rich lessons from the experiences of very diverse women’s groups who have built solidarity from the opposition camp. Having spent a decade working as an activist alongside women from across the globe, I was taken back in time by these authors as I remembered the weight borne by groups of women, not wanting their own internal struggles for coherence, energy and voice to undermine the ability of a broader agenda to push through. Hierarchies within movements are inevitable, while goals must be negotiated and agreed upon. We are left wanting to praise these collectives for what they have achieved in the face of such oppression and resistance but also acknowledge the realities of diversity within.

Yet, we may also want to ask how much these women’s groups have managed to succeed because their agendas—although in some contexts controversial—are by and large politically palatable and socially acceptable, as the groups themselves have constrained their own demands for change. Ultimately, readers may perceive these quieter, more localised and negotiated forms of opposition as amounting to disruption; perhaps it is the notion of ‘disruption’ that needs a rethink.