Critical junctures and collective responses: transfeminist times in Italy, 2008 and 2020

How do feminist groups respond to and politicize crises? To answer this question, the paper looks at two critical junctures, two ‘externally dictated’ structural changes and emergencies: the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the pandemic crisis of 2020. In doing so, this work offers a snapshot of the ever-changing constellation of feminist, queer and transfeminist groups during those times, looking in particular at the type of discourses they developed to make sense of their present to overcome it. Often overlooked, the tracing of discourses and debates is crucial to understand movements; moreover, photographing the movement in two points in time can pinpoint to the ambivalent relations movement have with time. Thus, the time activists’ groups respond to crises varies greatly: it took a few years for feminist and queer groups in Italy to address the financial crisis directly; possibly it took a few years for the effects of the crisis to truly sink in. And when it did, responses and elaborations did not arrive seamlessly: the urgency of recuperating an autonomist and materialist discourses on the boundaries between work and non-work, on oppression and exploitation was not grasped by all, and brought about fiery debates, oftentimes (albeit not always) played along generational lines. The case of the pandemic looks however a lot different: the crisis arrived immediately for all; and it caught the transfeminist movement stronger and more prepared than ever as materialist discourses on social reproduction were readily available to make sense of the current crisis of care. The two snapshots show how emergencies have different times, as much as movement groups go are susceptible to cycles. What is more, there is a consistent mismatch between the time of emergencies and that of movements, pointing to how a structural analysis, rooted in singular points in time, does not suffice. In line with many others studying feminist movements, this paper invites to look at these phenomena longitudinally, with an attention to what happens in the cracks. To do so and trace continuities and discontinuities, the researcher resorts to semi-structured, in-depth interviews, group interviews, movement documents, and archival research.