Co-making solidarities through radical publishing: micropractices of minor transnationalism with Beatrix Pang and migrant domestic workers.

This article examines how migrant domestic workers' knowledge becomes legible and sustained under conditions of precarity by theorizing co-making as a methodological intervention into minor transnationalism. Rather than treating solidarity as a pre-given alignment or an achieved outcome, I approach...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Vol. 27; no. 3; pp. 334 - 353
Autor principal: TONG, Kin-Long
Formato: Essay
Publicado: Taylor & Francis Ltd Jun2026
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
Descripción
Sumario:This article examines how migrant domestic workers' knowledge becomes legible and sustained under conditions of precarity by theorizing co-making as a methodological intervention into minor transnationalism. Rather than treating solidarity as a pre-given alignment or an achieved outcome, I approach it as something assembled through micro-practices of mediation and care—practices that make relation possible while leaving difference unresolved. Drawing on feminist epistemologies of situated knowledge alongside zine scholarship's "do-it-ourselves" ethic, I argue that radical publishing can operate as an infrastructural method for cultivating lateral connection beyond state-centered or institutional models of transnationalism. The article traces a decade-long publishing practice of Hong Kong artist-publisher Beatrix Pang and centres an in-depth, process-oriented analysis of Women Behind Closed Doors (2023), a collaboratively produced zine initiated by Pang with migrant domestic workers in London. Reading the zine as both cultural artifact and processual practice, I trace how solidarity is negotiated across three stages: participatory workshops, editorialization (through scanning and collage), and production and circulation. The analysis highlights how workshop exercises such as self-introduction and mind-mapping enact provisional forms of recognition; how scanning preserves the textures of process while refusing editorial smoothing; and how collage stages adjacency between testimony, activist research, and facilitator reflexivity without collapsing them into a unified voice. Attending to uneven labour, material constraint, and modest circuits of dissemination, I show how minor transnationalism takes shape not as a coherent network or shared identity, but as a fragile, present-tense practice enacted through co-making.