Since 2016, inspired by the Argentinian movement Ni Una Menos, Italian trans-feminist mobilizations have gained transnational momentum, developing hybrid repertoires of action, broad coalition-building, and intersectional practices. These developments have unfolded in a hostile political climate, where alliances between anti-gender groups and right-wing parties have curtailed reproductive, migrant, and LGBTQIA+ rights. While existing scholarship has highlighted the reactive strategies of trans-feminist activists in confronting these attacks, less attention has been paid to their prefigurative practices – understood as collective efforts to envision and enact alternative futures in the here and now –, as well as to the entanglements between reactive strategies and prefigurative practices. To address this question, this research articulates a thematic analysis of 26 interviews and 3 focus groups conducted with 33 Italian trans-feminist organizations in 2024. Our findings indicate that trans-feminist responses to exclusionary politics – such as protests and vigils – do entail a prefigurative dimension that unfolds through everyday practices of care, co-living and grassroots knowledge production. We conceptualize these practices as ‘prefigurative re-actions’: reactions to present attacks that simultaneously open spaces of collective liberation and contribute to imagining enabling futures. Our research shows that, through ‘prefigurative re-actions’ Italian trans-feminist activists not only resist intersectional inequalities, but also cultivate concrete alternatives to, quoting bell hooks, the ‘white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.’ By examining how Italian trans-feminist groups both react to exclusionary politics and create alternative spaces and futures through everyday practices, this paper contributes to current literature on feminist imaginaries as acts of collective liberation, and their potential to transform societies in intense and hostile times.
