Dr Xianan Jin (she/her)

Dr Xianan Jin is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Exeter's Penryn Campus. She joined the department in September 2022, where she convenes modules including 'Politics of Gender and Sexuality', 'Queer Theory', and 'Politics and Gender in Africa'. Before that, she was conducting her PhD project, The Political Economy of Women's Political Participation in Rwanda: Gender, Class and Statebuilding, at SOAS University of London. Her PhD thesis is shortlisted for the Best Thesis by the African Studies Association UK in 2024.

She has studied politics and practised feminism in Beijing, Taipei, Bologna, London and Kigali. Xianan is interested in the representation and resistance of gendered subjects in global politics, particularly, how gendered subjects participate in politics in authoritarian contexts. For her first book project, she did her fieldwork in Rwanda for a year to investigate women’s everyday engagement with politics after the genocide in 1994. The book manuscript, Selective Capital in Women's Political Participation: Neoliberal Authoritarianism in Rwanda, is in progress. The book argues that Rwanda has achieved success with gender legislative reform aimed at increasing the presence of women in politics, but only under circumstances she refers to as ‘neoliberal authoritarianism’. Neoliberal authoritarianism connects the liberal feminist project that advocates for women’s numeric presence in political institutions with the authoritarian regime’s centralized leadership and suppression of protests for economic and social justice based on everyday struggles to survive.