Artistic Activism and Feminist Advocacy Against Violence: An Ethnography of Migrant Women’s Participation in Hong Kong’s One Billion Rising

Violence against women is a pervasive global crisis, with an estimated one billion women affected in their lifetimes. To confront this issue, various feminist movements have employed a diverse range of protest repertoires, including demonstrations, rallies, and artistic interventions. While existing scholarship has advanced our understanding of the networks, strategies, and emotional dynamics within social movements, less attention has been paid to how artistic activism shapes experiences and interpretations of violence, particularly among marginalised women such as migrant domestic workers. To address this gap, this article explores the intersection of artistic activism, feminist advocacy against violence, and transnational mobility by investigating migrant domestic workers’ participation in One Billion Rising (OBR), a global campaign to end gendered aggression, in Hong Kong. Ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews show that through OBR, migrant women link their plight as domestic workers to the global feminist imagination and expand the framing of violence to hold accountable discriminatory migration policies; through public displays of visuals and corporeal practices, they breathe fresh life into their experiences of violence that hitherto had been confined behind the closed doors of their employers’ homes. Despite transformative possibilities, artistic activism is conditioned by participants’ intersectional identities, technological affordances, and the activism climate in the region. By focusing on artistic activism, this research contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the varied practices and meanings that animate contemporary movements against gender-based violence.