‘But How Do We Do Politics When We Feel So Rootless?’: Affective Prefiguration of Transnational Feminist Diaspora Activism from Poland and Turkey

This article examines the affective prefiguration (Light 2023) of transnational feminist diaspora activism by focusing on 40 feminist activists from Poland and Turkey who migrated or went into (self-)exile amid escalating political repression and anti-gender campaigns targeting feminist and LGBTQ+ actors in their home countries. Following Quinsaat’s (2013) social movement approach to diaspora activism, the article analyzes how feminist diaspora activists carry the tensions and contradictions of familiar repertoires of contention from their home countries to host-country (feminist) political contexts (Tilly 1986; Tilly and Tarrow 2006; della Porta 2013; Jasper 1997, 2018). Drawing on life-history interviews conducted between 2022 and 2025, the study adopts an integrated analytical framework that connects homeland-oriented activism, host-country political engagement, and transnational practices, moving beyond the conventional separation of these domains in diaspora activism scholarship (Østergaard-Nielsen 2003; Portes 1999, 2006; Morales and Morariu 2011; Baser 2015; Zederman 2024). It pays particular attention to the affective and political dissonances that emerge when repertoires shaped in conflictual homeland contexts encounter host-country politics and feminist movements (Lang 1997; Mouffe 2005, 2013; Ana 2023, 2025). Rather than treating these tensions as a simple loss of political rootlessness, the article explores how feminist diaspora activists re-imagine political belonging through migrant-led transnational feminist networks and grassroots organizations. Drawing on debates on prefigurative politics and affective prefiguration, it examines how emotional, relational, and embodied practices of care, solidarity, and mutual recognition become central to sustaining activism in post-migration status (Maeckelbergh 2011; Monticelli 2023; Light 2023). By foregrounding the prefigurative dimensions of feminist diaspora activism, the article contributes to social movement and diaspora studies by showing how seeking new political roots in a host-country context carries its own dissonances, tensions, ambivalences, as well as its own transnational solidarities.