Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, research on opposition movements in authoritarian contexts has expanded significantly in recent years, particularly regarding digital repression and exile mobilization in Central and Eastern Europe. At the same time, feminist scholarship has long theorized emotional labour as a structural feature of gendered inequality. Yet these literatures rarely intersect. Existing studies of Russian anti-authoritarian activism tend to focus on repression, organizational fragmentation, or digital surveillance, while largely overlooking how gendered affective responsibilities shape political activism in exile. The study investigates how digital emotional labour becomes structurally imposed on women within Russian anti-authoritarian digital activism after 2022. Drawing on digital ethnography conducted between Februray 2022 and November 2025 and 21 semi-structured interviews with activists in exile across the word, the paper traces how care work is unevenly distributed within online activist environments. The study argues that digital resistance infrastructures are sustained by gendered affective economies. I conceptualize this as “granted emotional labour”: a form of normalized, expected, and depoliticized emotional work that becomes structurally embedded in digital and hybrid activism. This dynamic produces a double bind for women activists: visibility exposes them to heightened harassment, while invisibilized care work remains indispensable yet unacknowledged.Theoretically, the study bridges scholarship on authoritarianism, digital politics, and feminist political theory, while empirically, it contributes to debates on Central and Eastern European politics by demonstrating how exile-based digital spaces function simultaneously as laboratories of democratization and sites where gendered hierarchies persist.
