Connecting through and beyond Self-love: Female-only Co-living Community as Praxis of Anti-family in China

"What chemical reaction happens when women come together to live based on mutual love and support?" Two Chinese women, considering this question, embarked on an experimental female-only co-living project that has been operating in China for nearly two years. Their initiative has connected thousands of women, starting with one bedroom, a living room, a dining table, and specific activities to raise feminist consciousness. They explore how to form an "unbreakable female alliance" that transcends from "self-love" to "mutual love," resisting women's commodification, isolation, and inferiority in a patriarchal capitalist society. Self-love, as I understand it, involves not only the remaking of the self, while within and beyond the self, but also the remaking of social relations, with a focus on forming political communities (Nash, 2011). I interpret their Co-Living experiment as a struggle against class and gender inequalities, confronting the privatized nuclear family and its underlying love politics against the backdrop of the deepening crisis of capitalist social reproduction.