Hugging as a Pedagogical Possibility: Body, Affects, and Feminist Cry – Fieldnotes from Online Life-Writing Workshops for Chinese Women

What has led to the tendency of self-punishment and self-devaluation in women’s life-writing? Situated in my practice as a life-writing tutor in China, grounded in feminist new materialism and affective methodologies, this paper applies hugging in an online educational context to investigate whether/how the embodied everyday practice can transform the self-punishment tendencies and what pedagogical possibilities it holds. Through practice-based research, semi-structural conversations, and thematic analysis, three common contributing factors to Chinese women’s self-punishment tendency emerge: (1) the patriarchal tradition, (2) the single-dimensional numeric assessment system, (3) a punish/reward mindset in family upbringing. Lastly, it presents a narrative of how these three factors ‘diffracted’ in individuals as well as the affective traces of hugging, leading to a final discussion underpinned by uncertainty and fluidity, instead of causality and certainty.