Care, Survival, and Solidarity: Intersectional HIV Activism Among Trans and Sex Worker Communities in 1980s Italy

This paper examines how trans and non-trans sex worker communities in 1980s Italy developed intersectional forms of political action long before “intersectionality” became an established analytical framework. Situating Italy within broader European debates, the project recovers a set of grassroots practices—peer-led healthcare, harm reduction, migrant solidarity, and community-based knowledge production—that challenged dominant medicalized and punitive responses to HIV/AIDS. Drawing on archival research and collected oral history interviews, the paper reconstructs a chronology of activism that includes the 1981 strike by street sex workers against HIV-related stigma, the first registered case of HIV in Rome (1983), Bologna’s transgender movement MiT publishing one of Italy’s earliest community HIV fanzines (1991), and sex-worker–led peer harm-reduction networks that emerged in the mid-1990s. These initiatives show how queer, trans, and racialized sex workers confronted the overlapping effects of state neglect, criminalization, and structural racism by forging solidarities across identities, professions, and social movements. This paper traces how these groups mobilized care as a political practice of interconnecting struggles against gendered, sexual, and racialized exclusion. Foregrounding these histories enables a more nuanced mapping of European feminist and LGBTQ movements, one attentive to actors whose analyses have rarely been recognized as theoretical contributions. While operating outside formal theoretical vocabularies, their efforts to link gender, sexuality, labour, migration, and health illuminate dynamics similar to Patricia Collins’ account of interlocking systems of power and the situated forms of knowledge that emerge from them. Attending to these resonances helps to complicate linear genealogies of intersectionality and opens space for reconsidering how communities negotiate complex configurations of inequality through everyday political practice.