Paper short abstract:

The paper describes how Italian queer precarious workers perceive their social and working condition, and how they try to resist work exploitation, addressing simultaneously normative assumptions about professional and sentimental “success”, and the “political economy of the promise”.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2013 Italian anti-capitalist queer and transfeminist movement has been inquiring on the connections between productive and reproductive work, affects and identity (SomMovimento NazioAnale 2014). My research itself is part of this wider grassroots self-etnographic poject.

In my paper I will describe how queer precarious workers who participated in this research perceive precarious employment and limited social mobility, but also how they try to resist exploitation and produce alternative work cultures that could enhance such resistance.

To understand this process, it has to be examined together with other component of the "good adult life", which is/used to be marriage, or at least a committed, cohabiting, long term future-oriented couple relationship.

Work and marriage - that is, having a place in production and reproduction - have been the main pillars of identity in Fordist era. Our field work shows that despite economic, political and cultural changes that have made young people less and less likely (and/or willingly) to actualize this model, it still works as desire and never-reached ideal (Berlant 2007), a process which has been called "political economy of the promise" (Bascetta 2014) and takes specific connotations in the case of gay, lesbian, transgender and sexually excentric subjects (Fiorilli 2014).

The paper will illustrate how queer lives, although among contradiction and conflitcs, constitute as an embodied critique not only to the content of the normative life course (work and couple) but also of its inherent narrative structure, the progressive, teleological temporality it implies and construct.