- Convenors:
-
María Soledad Cutuli
(Universidad Complutense de Madrid - Universidad de Buenos Aires)
Ruby Mascarenhas Neto (Freie Universität Berlin)
Livia Motterle (Universitat Rovira i Virgili)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
- Networks:
- Network Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores how labor, politics, and moralities intersect in feminist and queer ethnographies, examining inequalities, resistances, and the institutional production of gendered and sexualized work.
Long Abstract
This panel, organized by the Gender and Sexualities Anthropology Network, addresses the intersections between work, politics, and moralities from feminist and queer anthropological perspectives. Across diverse contexts marked by neoliberal reforms and conservative backlashes, questions of labor and value—productive, reproductive, and sexual—have become key arenas for both institutional regulation and collective resistance.
We invite contributions that analyze how gendered and sexualized forms of labor are recognized, stigmatized, or contested in relation to broader political and moral orders. This includes research on reproductive and care work, sex work, and feminized or informal economies, as well as the struggles of unions, feminist and LGBTQ+ movements, and state agencies to redefine what counts as legitimate work and who counts as a legitimate worker.
At the same time, the panel foregrounds how institutional practices in areas such as labor regulation, welfare, health, and education produce moral distinctions—between decency and deviance, legitimacy and exclusion—that shape everyday experiences and hierarchies. These processes are not merely oppressive but also generate spaces of negotiation and resistance, where subjects re-signify norms and challenge moral and political boundaries.
By combining ethnographic, comparative, and collaborative approaches, this panel aims to rethink how feminist anthropology can account for the entanglements of work, sexuality, and moral order. We welcome papers that engage with contemporary debates on trans and feminist labor rights, institutional stigma, and the moral economies of care, desire, and survival. In doing so, the panel seeks to open a critical dialogue on how power, inequality, and affect are embodied, resisted, and reimagined in everyday practices of work and life.
Accepted papers
Session 2Paper 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
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
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.