Paper short abstract

This paper examines the phenomenon of student sex work through an ethnographic and intersectional lens, focusing on the social and political factors shaping institutional stigma in Spanish and Italian universities.

Paper long abstract

In recent years, stigma against sex workers has become a central concern in feminist studies of social exclusion, sexualities, and gender. This paper understands stigma not merely as an individual or cultural disposition, but as a moral and institutional technology embedded in everyday bureaucratic practices, shaping forms of regulation, recognition, and exclusion.

Based on a multi-sited ethnography carried out at four of the largest universities in Southern Europe, this paper explores how institutional stigma is produced and enacted within university settings in Spain and Italy, focusing on the experiences of student sex workers in their interactions with educational institutions. It shows that universities are not neutral spaces, but can instead become arenas shaped by power relations in which certain subjectivities and identities are legitimized or silenced.

The paper thus seeks to open a critical debate and to foster shared educational responsibility in addressing stigma, as well as pedagogies that challenge moral and political boundaries. In doing so, it aims to promote feminist and intersectional reflections oriented toward sexual democracy and social justice within and beyond the university.

Paper short abstract

Based on archival sources and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines transfeminine resistance in Turkey, focusing on the core demands that underpin it and how it is continually shaped by the precarity experienced by transfeminine (sex worker) communities.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines transfeminine resistance in Turkey, focusing on the core demands that underpin it and how it is continually shaped by the precarity experienced by transfeminine (sex worker) communities. Combining archival sources with ethnographic fieldwork, the article approaches resistance as a dynamic, socially and historically emergent process. The archival research draws on oral history and media sources to trace transfeminine resistance from the 1970s to the present, situating it within broader political, economic, and legal contexts. Complementing this, the ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Izmir intermittently between 2017 and 2019 with a transfeminine sex worker community offers an in-depth analysis of how resistance unfolds in everyday life and is both informed by and negotiated through material realities. Together, these sections demonstrate that transfeminine struggle has been rooted primarily in the access to basic material conditions, namely safety, home, and subsistence. While shared vulnerability, produced by the intersecting forces of violence, spatial exclusion, policing, and economic marginalization, provides grounds for collective action, resistance also exposes individuals to risks of bodily harm, detention, and the loss of livelihood or home. This makes resistance a fragile and risky terrain for those pushed to the furthest margins of social, political, and economic life. Compared to much of the global public or media debates on trans lives, these observations highlight a class dimension that critically shapes the daily circumstances and forms of organizing within transfeminine (sex worker) communities in urban Turkey.

Paper short abstract

This article argues that ethnography is a poetic practice. Using Trans-Queer-Kothi community poems, it shows how poetry archives embodied, sensory knowledge and theorises marginalisation, advocating collaborative, ethnopoetic methods.

Paper long abstract

This article argues that conventional ethnographic writing fails to capture the poetic and sensory realities of marginalised communities, such as the Kothi (a term in South Asia denoting male-assigned individuals who embody femininity, often within queer and sex-worker circles). Proposing that doing ethnography is akin to writing poetry, it employs an ethnopoetic lens to demonstrate how poetry functions as a method of embodied knowing. Through collaboratively created poems, the analysis reveals how Kothi verse articulates the body as a historical archive, maps sensory landscapes of risk, expresses queer temporalities, and wields metaphor as a survival tool. The article contends that these poems are not merely illustrative but are primary epistemological documents that theorise lived experience. It concludes by advocating an ethnopoetic method centred on embodied listening, sensory documentation, and collaborative hermeneutics, thereby shifting anthropological practice from writing about communities to engaging with them through their own expressive forms.

Paper short abstract

This paper presents early findings on how dark-skinned Brazilian dancers navigated migration to work in Germany in the 1970s. Drawing on descriptive Brazilian sources, it examines imaginaries of the future formed within a context shaped by race, gender, class, exploitation, and authoritarianism.

Paper long abstract

This paper presents preliminary reflections on the imaginaries of the future among dark skinned Brazilian women, racialized as "mulatas" and "jambetes," who migrated as performers to Germany in the 1970s. Taking as an entry point a documented human trafficking case uncovered in 1970, the study examines how these women navigated intersecting structures of race, gender, class, and nationality while envisioning migration as a potential route toward alternative futures. Rather than offering definitive conclusions, it explores how aspirations were shaped by the constraints of authoritarianism, racial hierarchies, and economic marginalization in Brazil. In parallel, it considers the exoticizing media narratives and labour exploitation that framed their recruitment and reception in West Germany.

Methodologically, the work is grounded in ongoing archival research in Brazilian and German collections, with current findings relying primarily on descriptive Brazilian media sources. The analysis is also informed by Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, which provides a framework for engaging ethically and imaginatively with archival silences and fragmented traces.

Based on debates on temporalities, this paper examines how imaginaries of the future shape and are shaped by racialized and gendered conditions of mobility and agency. Such reconstruction also instigates us to problematize enduring dynamics of migration, racial profiling, and labour exploitation that continue to structure transnational circulations today. More broadly, the paper fosters an interdisciplinary dialogue across anthropology, history, gender and sexuality studies, critical race theory, and migration studies.

Paper short abstract

This paper ethnographically analyzes how three Brazilian LGBTQIAP+ shelters produce politics by connecting with a diverse array of struggles, subjects, and movements. The objective is to explore how sheltering and territorial policies forge multiple forms of coalition among heterogeneous people.

Paper long abstract

This paper ethnographically analyzes how three Brazilian LGBTIQAP+ shelters — Casa 1, CasAmor, and Casa Miga — produce politics by connecting with various struggles, subjects, and movements. These institutions serve as welcoming spaces for LGBTQIAP+ individuals expelled from their family environments due to their gender identities and sexualities. Located in different regions of Brazil, they operate through policies aimed at supporting people in situations of economic and social vulnerability. In the first part of this text, I analyze how the sheltering policies of these three houses are developed through everyday labor that involves partnerships with multiple political subjects. The intention here is to examine the making of living spaces, as well as the forms of daily care provided to the vulnerabilized LGBTQIAP+ population. In the second part, the analysis shifts to how the territorial policies of these shelters are elaborated through daily work with other political movements and state agents. Through a relationship of interdependence with these actors, I demonstrate how the shelters promote a range of activities and services for those they assist. Finally, the paper reflects on the political making of these shelters as a politics of coalitions involving people, territories, and struggles that intersect and move beyond the inequalities and violence faced by the LGBTQIAP+ community. I argue that the policies of these shelters connect existences that are otherwise extrinsic to one another, forging new relationalities and shared territories.

Paper short abstract

Crew employment institutionalizes gendered labour through moral economies recognizing women only as partners performing intimate obligation. These arrangements generate spaces of resistance where women collectively re-signify legitimate work through everyday refusal and solidarity.

Paper long abstract

What happens when institutions recognize women's labour only through their partnerships? This paper traces how crew employment in European logistics institutionalizes specific moral distinctions that reproduce gendered hierarchies while simultaneously generating spaces where women contest these boundaries.

Drawing on twelve in-depth interviews with Romanian women truck drivers, three interviews with fleet managers, and digital ethnography in WhatsApp solidarity networks, this study examines crew employment under EU Regulations as institutional mechanism through which capital appropriates reproductive labour while naturalizing this appropriation as intimate complementarity. When fleet managers state that "couples stay at work longer," they articulate a deliberate strategy: women's affective labour subsidizes their partners' productivity and company profit, yet this appropriation is legitimized through moral language of partnership rather than economic exploitation.

The industry phrase "the man drives on the woman's card" crystallizes how women are institutionally positioned: recognized primarily through their partnerships, their independent worker status obscured. Legally mandated rest periods become sites where reproductive labour colonizes mandated breaks, leaving workers exhausted. When this exhaustion produces psychological distress, institutions pathologize it: couples seeking counselling are told to "learn how to manage the situation," reframing structural violence as interpersonal deficiency.

Women build alternative kinships through WhatsApp networks where "we understand each other's emotions, problems, offering emotional support." This persistence itself becomes political—"Many tried to make me quit driving. They did not succeed" embodying refusal to accept institutional stigmatization.

This paper contributes to understanding how power, inequality, and affect are embodied, resisted, and reimagined in everyday practices of work and life.

Paper short abstract

This paper uses a feminist political economy lens to examine how female tomato traders and queen mothers in Ghana navigate capitalist and patriarchal hierarchies and culturally embedded care norms, revealing informal markets as sites of governance, moral contestation, and power negotiation.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the positionality of female wholesale traders in Ghana’s tomato value chain through a feminist political economy lens. These traders and their leaders, the so-called “tomato queens”, occupy a paradoxical position: celebrated as guarantors of food security yet stigmatised for dominating the markets and setting high prices, at the expense of smallholder farmers and consumers alike. Their contribution, while essential to Ghana’s agrifood system, is frequently framed as exploitative, raising questions about legitimacy, morality, and power in informal economies. These aspects become even more pronounced when taking gendered and culturally grounded expectations for women's care and reproductive responsibilities into account.

Drawing on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in Accra (2024–2025), I explore how these women negotiate patriarchal and capitalist hierarchical structures within informally organised everyday economically relevant social and business practices. Rather than viewing informality as marginal, this research situates it as a site of governance and contestation, where institutional regulation and moral distinctions are continuously configured and challenged.

By foregrounding traders’ positionality within intersecting systems of power, this paper contributes to feminist debates on labour and value in formal-informal economic continuums. It also engages with anthropological discussions on how gendered actors challenge and reproduce institutional norms in contexts marked by economic precarity and shifting moral orders. Ultimately, this study illuminates the entanglement of gender, capital, and authority in the everyday political economy of food systems in the Global South.

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research in Argentina and Spain, this paper analyses how “fraud” operates as a moral and political category shaping disputes over trans labour rights, legitimacy, and citizenship across state institutions, media discourses, and feminist and trans activist arenas.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how the notion of “fraud” operates as a moral and political category in contemporary disputes over trans rights in Argentina and Spain. Drawing on comparative ethnographic research situated in the anthropology of political sexuality and moralities, the paper analyses how accusations of fraud circulate across institutional, media, and activist arenas, producing regimes of suspicion that exceed legal frameworks.

On the one hand, public and bureaucratic discourses frame trans inclusion as a potential abuse of rights, mobilising “fraud” as a technology of moral regulation that disciplines gendered and sexualised forms of labour and citizenship. These dynamics resonate with global anti-gender narratives that seek to delegitimise trans people as workers, beneficiaries of welfare, or political subjects. On the other hand, the paper explores internal tensions within trans and feminist activism, where debates over the “true spirit” of quota policies reveal competing moral economies of deservingness, vulnerability, and political legitimacy.

By following how “fraud” is invoked, contested, and resignified in everyday interactions with state agencies, activist spaces, and media narratives, the paper shows how moral distinctions between legitimacy and illegitimacy shape access to work, rights, and recognition. Rather than treating these disputes as purely ideological, the analysis foregrounds their material consequences for trans livelihoods and political strategies.

The paper argues that an anthropology of moralities helps to grasp how advances in gender and labour rights coexist with enduring regimes of suspicion, compelling feminist and queer movements to navigate these tensions without relinquishing hard-won gains.

Paper short abstract

Austrian welfare officers assess what a proper relationship is with itemized “lists of love” when meeting queer loving and living, revealing the entanglements of statehood, sexuality, labour, and morality in queer living struggles in times of neoliberalization and backlash.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on queer and economic anthropology, this paper investigates Austrian welfare bureaucracies as sites to explore entanglements between labor, sexuality, and normative orders. The legal notion of "Lebensgemeinschaft" (household community) regulates subsidiarity and the redistribution of resources through assessments of economic interdependence and relational intimacy. My explorative ethnography reveals bureaucrats confronted by diverse modalities of relatedness: queer marriages and registered partnerships, shared flats, non-monogamous partnerships, and asexual living arrangements. Faced with a detailed legal definitions, they sought to classify these ties amid time pressures, neoliberal bureaucracy, and clients’ strategic performances.

Wedged between an anti-queer politics and their often liberal convictions, bureaucrats came up with “lists of love,” itemizing intimacy, sexuality, and (re)productive labour to evaluate these queer potential “Lebensgemeinschaften.” These were moral assessments of respectability, but with severe material consequences, as lower social transfers are paid out in case of relationships that could be responsibilized for mutual upkeep. These entanglements generate complex moral and material consequences, as a site of tensions and contestations, but also one offering ambivalent forms of material relief where sexuality intertwines with care work and survival strategies amidst backlash.

My analysis furthers queer Marxian understandings of labour and the state, foregrounding the production of redistributive resources and the stigmatization or valorization of gendered and sexualized reproductive labor. The paper contributes to rethinking feminist and queer labor ethnographies, illuminating polarized everyday struggles where subjects come up together with variants of “loving like a state,” bureaucratically adequate readings and reimagined forms of queer loving and living.