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Paper Short Abstract:

Drawing on recent fieldwork in Italy, this paper looks at different configurations of the citizenship-debt nexus which have emerged through struggles to redefine welfare politics; specifically, I will be examining efforts to foreground the reproductive debt owed to unwaged and informal workers.

Paper Abstract:

Reflecting on recent fieldwork in late-industrial Italy, this paper tracks competing ideologies of social citizenship as debt/credit, and their articulation with redistributive struggles in the context of ongoing welfare reforms brought in by Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government. Drawing on Angela Mitropoulos’ feminist critique of the post-war welfare state as premised on “the often violent projection of genealogies and infrastructures of obligation” now recast in simultaneously moral and economic terms as indebtedness (Mitropoulos 2012), I examine three discrete configurations of the citizenship-debt nexus which are currently being mobilised within political conflicts around the uses and distribution of public income.

Firstly, I consider the construction of social citizenship as mutual obligation between generations of gendered and racialised National subjects underpinning the pronatalist policies of the new Social Right (Destra Sociale). Secondly, I look at the construction of social citizenship as mutual obligation between generations of gendered workers within “an equal society of producers” (Vercellone 1996) threatened by the excessive claims of the unproductive. The latter discourse is used to re-impose necessity in bipartisan calls for structural reform. I argue that both constructions rely on the same mechanisms of naturalisation and rationalisation, i.e. the extension of domestic logics of value, hierarchy and necessity to the social. I contrast these to a politics of collective indebtedness that centres the contributions of unwaged and informal labourers to social reproduction and to the social surplus, articulated within current feminist struggles in defence of the Citizenship Income (Reddito di Cittadinanza).