Structures of Affect: A Feminist Approach toward China's Political Culture proposes the paradigm “structures of affect” to examine lived and felt realities beyond deductive categories of analysis. Drawing on filmmaking, podcasting, artistic and cultural practices, and autoethnography from 2000s to 2025, it explores how authoritarianism is sustained through affective mechanisms while also tracing subtle, everyday forms of resistance. The book analyzes how Chinese princelings' formative experiences shaped misogynist, anti-business, and anti-West worldviews conducive to strongman politics, and how gendered hierarchies within activism reproduce sexism and authoritarian practices. It highlights grassroots and artistic resistances, including Sinophone-Tibetan feminists and queer ethnic minority artists, as well as responses to the Ukraine war and China's COVID-19 control.
The study envisions feminist, queer, and anarchist imaginaries for community building, proposing queering, care, and self-making as alternative epistemologies and ethics. Moving beyond institutional approaches and the study of ideology, it reveals the affective forces that sustain both state power and activist politics, while offering transformative paradigms for engaging with repressive societies.