After 5:30 PM: When rest is no longer resistance

An unexpected absence

Work starts at 9:00 AM. At 5:30 PM, the office lights turn off. By 5:35 PM, the hallways are empty. No one needs to apologize for leaving on time. No one has to boast about emails sent at midnight or display dedication by looking visibly exhausted. Work is distributed relatively evenly, deadlines are designed realistically, and weekend rest periods are respected. During my first month working at a local feminist organization in Vietnam, my positionality as a returning activist-researcher made me acutely sensitive to an atmosphere that locals had viewed as normal. I realized I often walked home with a sense of bewilderment that felt like disillusionment. My organization at the time was active and explicitly political. The staff regularly organized gender-equality trainings, drafted policy recommendations, and coordinated with state and private agencies. Still, it lacked the emotional intensity I had grown accustomed to in feminist activism. The atmosphere was structured, procedural, and unusually calm. No one exhibited overt burnout.

Perhaps my discomfort did not stem from doubts regarding the organization’s political commitment so much as a dissonance between my expectations of what feminist resistance should feel like and the actual institutional rhythm. Throughout many years of participating in diverse social movements, I had gradually internalized the fantasy that urgency is synonymous with authenticity and that social activism must inevitably include fierce anger and tangible sacrifice. As I saw everything take on an administrative guise in my home country, this sense of letdown exposed a subconscious assumption: I had learned to read exhaustion as the sole evidence of the struggle against structural inequality. For me, burnout had become a diagnostic tool. If activists were not continually banging their heads against the institutional “brick wall” to the point of exhaustion (Ahmed, 2017), perhaps they had failed to adequately challenge the power structure.

Beginning from that recognition, this essay enters into a dialogue with feminist theories on burnout, rest, and governmentality. I aim to directly unpack the tension between the romanticization of exhaustion as the sole metric of authentic struggle and the complex ambivalence of institutional serenity. While this analysis draws from one organizational context, the argument concerns broader regimes of managed feminist institutionalization under state-aligned governance. I argue that while Hersey’s (2022) formulation of rest as a subversive refusal is profoundly necessary, rest becomes resistance only when it disrupts the regime that authorizes it. When rest is actively curated by an institution to neutralize political rupture, it ceases to be a tool of liberation and becomes a subtle mechanism of pacification. Thus, its significance depends entirely on whether it challenges the configurations of constraint or inadvertently reinforces them.

From structural critique to a limiting epistemic device

It is undeniable that contemporary feminist scholarship has brilliantly reframed burnout from an individual phenomenon to a structural one (Ahmed, 2017; Hersey, 2022). Exhaustion is understood as the predictable consequence of capitalism and grind culture, in which bodies are reduced to tools of production and care is privatized (The Care Collective et al., 2020; Hobart and Kneese, 2020). Lorde’s (1988) assertion that caring for oneself is an act of “political warfare” unsettled traditions that equate sacrifice with virtue. Building upon that foundation, Hersey (2022) views rest as a subversive refusal of the historical logic that exploited marginalized bodies. In these contributions, power operates not only through rules but also through the “cultural politics of emotion,” where fatigue constructs the boundaries of collective bodies (Ahmed, 2014). Empirical research across multiple regions further consolidates the weight of this analytical framework. Ana (2023) points out that the process of “NGO-ization” has generated structural burnout by forcing activists into a perpetual search for precarious sources of funding. It also cultivates a “martyrdom culture” in which a profound commitment to a cause legitimizes self-exploitation. Similarly, Lorey (2009 [2006]) exposes the mechanism of “self-precarization,” demonstrating how workers’ desire for autonomy and freedom from traditional institutions is subtly weaponized to make them voluntarily internalize precarity.

Furthermore, burnout circumscribes the capacity for change not merely by physically depleting bodies but also by distorting the epistemology of political work. As Kelekay et al. (2025) warn, exhaustion within the “academic industrial machine” forces activists to “contort” their research to fit “white colorblind and liberal consumption”, making them complicit in reproducing colonial epistemologies. This systemic fatigue sows cynicism, creating discursive closures that cause the public to abandon hope in alternative horizons (Sargsyan, 2019). Yet, precisely because of its immense explanatory power regarding this structural factor, burnout has gradually accumulated an epistemic authority within transnational feminist discourse. It has inadvertently become a device that defines the emotional norm of real struggle. Consequently, spaces where labor does not manifest as depletion risk being labeled as lacking radicalism rather than being analyzed through different logics of governance. This implicit universalization demands that we resituate burnout within specific historical conditions to illustrate power that does not deplete but rather pacifies.

Soft governance and the relocation of exhaustion

The lack of visible exhaustion within the NGO thus emerges as a site of profound political ambivalence. Here, power operates through what I term “soft governance.” This concept can be differentiated from familiar critiques of the neoliberal NGO industrial complex. While standard NGO-ization sanitizes structural demands into bureaucratic deliverables (Ana, 2023) and neoliberal responsibilization forces individuals to privately manage their own survival, soft governance operates differently. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of biopolitics (Lemke, 2001), this form of governance manages collective well-being in ways that can forestall political rupture. It is not merely the co-optation of a critique after the fact but the preemptive embedding of pacification into the very architecture of care. As O’Malley et al. (1997) argue, top-down programs of governance (such as the administrative demands of international funders) are continuously reshaped through everyday contestation and the “messy actualities” of their implementation. For example, a neoliberal mandate for constant productivity is never perfectly enforced. Rather, it is actively negotiated and altered on the ground when local management implements a strict 5:30 PM boundary to protect staff. Yet, under the logic of soft governance, this local act of protection is absorbed by the broader institution. Soft governance does not suppress care or rest. On the contrary, it recognizes and incorporates them, but only to the extent that they can be re-coded to stabilize the system. The regime incorporates rest precisely at the point where techniques of the self are integrated into structures of coercion and domination. This institutional approach cultivates politically docile bodies whose capacity for radical friction has been gently neutralized.

Within this configuration, the prompt 5:30 PM departure operates as a successful “minor engagement” (Power and Bergan, 2019). This is an everyday act that subtly reworks governing logics. Organizational leaders actively absorbed the extractive pressures of international funders and neoliberal audit cultures, constructing a strategic shield around the interiority of feminist labor. However, this protective shield is inseparable from its shadow. The calm administrative atmosphere I encountered cannot be interpreted solely as a feminist triumph over grind culture. Its serenity is not a sign that the system has been dismantled, only that it is no longer being forcefully confronted. This ambiguity is rooted in the geopolitical terrain of state feminism in Vietnam (Nguyễn and Rydstrom, 2022), where official gender discourse prioritizes social harmony and the ideal of the “happy and harmonious family” (gia đình hạnh phúc hòa thuận) as a national imperative. Disruptive political rupture is cast as destabilizing.

I vividly felt this structural shift in my role managing the organization’s communications. Previously, while working in advocacy for an NGO designed to address gender-based violence in South Africa, I was encouraged to employ an urgent, uncompromising, and raw voice. We deliberately utilized sharp, confrontational vocabulary to spark public outrage, drive engagement, and explicitly dissect oppressive power structures. Upon returning to Vietnam, however, I found my words subjected to meticulous institutional vetting. Even though my new organization focused on women’s entrepreneurship, a seemingly safer domain, every public message was carefully sanitized. This preemptive self-censorship matched an atmosphere of administrative caution designed to minimize external political risks. Topics deemed too sensitive for internal approval were preemptively sidelined. I observed the same dynamic among local NGOs attempting to tackle gender-based violence directly. There was no overt conflict, no explicit panic, just the quiet, methodical neutralization of mine and other radical voices to maintain institutional legibility.

If I am to practice true feminist reflexivity, I must admit my own complicity in this serenity. I did not push the organization to be more confrontational. I enjoyed leaving at 5:30 PM. I relished the comfort of an administrative guise that kept me safe from both state scrutiny and activist burnout. As Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) demonstrate, capitalism and state power renew themselves by internalizing our critiques. They grant our demands for work-life balance only to convert them into new managerial norms that neutralize collective resistance. Yet, is the absence of burnout truly an absence of friction? Under soft governance, co-optation reorganizes where exhaustion appears. It mutates from physical depletion into cognitive overload from continuous self-censorship. We were not exhausted by the hours we worked but by the continuous political compromises we had to navigate. If we were neither physically bruised nor exhausted, it was because we were no longer pressing against the limits of the permissible (Ahmed, 2017). Our collective rest was not the revolutionary refusal of productivity but a comfortable byproduct of avoiding institutional friction.

Furthermore, this authorized safety is unevenly distributed. We must ask: at whose expense is this administrative rest secured? If the professionalized NGO staff are resting, their structural exhaustion is displaced. More specifically, the burden of depletion is outsourced to unpaid community volunteers, grassroots partners, and marginalized women who carry the heavy, invisible labor of survival without the protective shield of formal employment (Hobart and Kneese, 2020). Our institutional rest, therefore, risks being subsidized by the ongoing precarity of those relegated outside of the NGO borderland.

Toward a contextualized movement of rest

If the meaning of rest is contingent upon the power it interacts with, how can we form a collective movement of rest without falling into the co-optation trap? The solution lies in shifting from a normative movement to a situated, diagnostic one. We cannot simply prescribe generic solutions like “time banks” or mutual aid groups (The Care Collective et al., 2020), which often presume a democratic public sphere. Instead, we must ask: How does one forge “fugitive spaces” (Kelekay et al., 2025) within a regime of state feminism and strict surveillance? In this context, a fugitive space might not be a physical sanctuary. It might look like the unrecorded, whispered conversations that follow the official, state-sanctioned gender training. Crucially, this fugitive rest must be rigorously distinguished from mere private venting, which acts as a tolerated safety valve, releasing institutional pressure so the machine can keep running. In contrast, fugitive rest is deeply strategic. It is the deliberate suspension of performing state-sanctioned legibility to preserve and incubate our dissenting imagination.

It is in these intimate, off-the-record micro spaces that power is demystified and true “promiscuous care” (The Care Collective et al., 2020) is practiced without the need for bureaucratic deliverables. The dissemination of such a movement operates through “multipliable networks of political consciousness” (Sargsyan, 2019) that strategically bypasses the highly monitored, state-approved channels of formal NGO networking. It relies on small groups willing to admit their internalized exhaustion, specifically the exhaustion of self-censorship, to validate each other’s political intuition and map the invisible borders of their constraints. This process prevents the isolation that soft governance relies on, preparing the ground for moments of “feminist snap” (Ahmed, 2017), when the collective decides that the price of administrative safety has grown too high.

Beyond burnout: A decolonial practice

Burnout remains an essential analytical category for identifying the violence of capitalism (Ana, 2023; Hersey, 2022). Nevertheless, the refusal to use exhaustion as the sole metric is a necessary practice of epistemic decoloniality. It demands that I stop imposing the expectations of transnational feminist discourse onto the institutionally delimited political spaces of Vietnam. As Desai and Narayan (2025) have warned, we must theorize from our geopolitical location and the complex entanglements of the local context. Returning to that moment at 5:30 PM at the office, I no longer view those empty hallways through the binary lens of simple disillusionment versus romanticized resistance. Instead, I situate them as a revealing site of continuous negotiation: clicking off the office lights at exactly 5:30 is a routine institutional safety measure, and the silence of the empty corridors functions as an indicator of our institutional integration.

The key question is not whether we are resting enough, but under what conditions we are permitted to rest and at what price. Resistance, after all, does not necessarily have to take the form of an exhausted body. Nevertheless, we must remain critically attentive so that our rest does not become the very infrastructure of appeasement. The daily task is no longer to recover from our labor but to continuously interrogate the silence we leave behind. We must recognize when our rest sustains the energy for those unrecorded, whispered conversations and when it merely integrates us into a pacified status quo.