Trans domesticities and urbanities: migratory routes, care networks and housing

The aim of this research is to study the trajectories of transgender or/and transexual people or/and gendernonconforming racialised people in the Brussels-Capital Region concerned by migration. The research aims to identify the impact of migration processes on trans people, the strategic networks of institutional, community, and/or invisible and/or clandestine care that are mobilised, and the impact of these dynamics on these people's access to housing. The research aims to facilitate understanding of the dynamics, issues and ecosystems of care work by and/or for trans migrants and its contemporary controversies in order to rethink care networks and access to housing. The methodology is based on the experiences of around twenty people who identify as trans· or gender non-conforming, in addition to the analysis and drawings of key care spaces (squats inhabited by and for the transgender non-conforming community, an institutional day centre, a politicised community space, etc.). Indeed, while the city is thought of from a patriarchal, white, heterosexual perspective (Rachele Borghi 2017, Preciado 2010), a number of so-called intersectional feminist works (Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, 1990; Angela Davis Women, Race and Class, 1981) still make the lives and experiences of trans people invisible, particularly those of racialised trans migrants, whose access to housing and care services is still too limited. The data will be identified and analysed on the basis of an intra-community selection, interviews and drawings of spaces, their networks of care and relationship to housing (drawing on the work of Candace West and Sarah Fenstermaker and their ethno-methodological approach on a dynamic micro-sociological scale, in particular to understand the dominations and assignments of race, gender and class); (Sarah Mazouz, with her plural articulation of modes of assignment. These journeys, as well as research based on secondary interviews using living memory and testimonies of these journeys, will be complemented by a focus on archives and the tracing of the history of trans migration in Belgium via tactical developments developed with the regional archive centre and HisHerTheirStories, an archive project by and for the trans community, recently funded by the FNRS.