Paper short abstract:

This paper, based on research conducted during the covid-19 pandemic period in the city of Bologna, Italy, looks at queer mutual aid initiatives and uses feminist theory around social reproduction and care to emphasize both the material dimension of queer care and the complicated affects it entails.

Paper long abstract:

By engaging with feminist theory around care concerning both social reproduction as well as ethics of care I will explore how queer mutual aid initiatives in Bologna, Italy, during the pandemic can shed new light on the materiality of queer life and affects.

I will discuss queer mutual aid, often discursively presented in strict opposition from charity and top-down care, as complex and imperfect in practice, yet still fundamental for the survival of queer networks. By looking at the complex affects that queer care can move, as well as at its limitations and slippages, I hope to shed light on the ambivalence of care from a queer perspective.

I will present the importance of queer mutual aid in relation to political revendications for welfare changes, as well as the discursive importance queer mutual aid has in highlighting the material dimension of queerness and the political role of care in social movements, often overshadowed and denied. Moreover, while in social movements care can often be devalued and overlooked, in the context of queer mutual aid and the pandemic, care re-emerges more clearly as central to life. I will give space to collective counter-narratives of care, countering the unfortunate association between care and repression that emerged during the lockdown periods, without losing sight of care still being a field of contention, power struggles, exploitation, and value extraction. I aim to analyse precisely this ambivalent nature of care as enacted in queer mutual aid initiatives.