The Pedagogy of Hugging

Grounded in feminist new materialism, autotheory, and affect theory, this chapter begins with a personal story of being “the worst hugger in the world” and evolves into an enquiry: what holds Chinese women back from hugging – physically, emotionally, metaphorically? Rather than invoking the problematic notion of “emotional literacy,” the chapter reimagines hugging as a mode of affective connection – between bodies and feelings, humans and more-than-human bodies. Through this lens, hugging becomes a site for exploring the structural conditions underpinning emotional suppression and self-devaluation, especially among Chinese women. These patterns, the author argues, are entangled with colonial Western knowledge paradigms that have long shaped how emotions and expression are framed in education and everyday life. The chapter asks: how might these intimate, vulnerable gestures unsettle dominant onto-epistemologies and educational systems? By tracing the sensory and affective textures of hugging – its embodiment, vulnerability, and uncertainty – the chapter reclaims such embodied practices as politically potent and pedagogically generative. What begins in discomfort becomes a provocation: to feel, to connect, and to resist through embodied everyday practices.