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Paper short abstract

Argentina's sexual education law ESI emerged through feminist struggles. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Buenos Aires spanning the 2023 elections, this research examines how its destabilization was experienced affectively, making visible infrastructures sustaining queer life beyond the state.

Paper long abstract

In the months leading up to Argentina’s 2023 presidential elections, queer people held their breath. I conducted research in Buenos Aires to explore the entangled intersections of queer communities, feminist activism and Argentinas national sexual education law (ESI), which emerged from activist struggles in 2006. Over time, the ESI had become a symbol for queer feminism and, as such, a target of escalating right-wing attacks. During five months of ethnographic fieldwork, I encountered the ESI as more than policy: a feminist infrastructure that oriented everyday life. It sustained pedagogical labor, political imagination, and precarious queer livelihoods, and was embraced and embodied in public events such as the Buenos Aires Pride (Marcha de Orgullo), where it appeared through chants, signs and drag performances. Following Berlant (2016), infrastructure is understood as a connective tissue that holds social worlds together materially and affectively. After the elections, feminist and queer public policies were placed under explicit threat. Drawing on Ahmed (2014), this analysis traces how this rupture was experienced affectively: through anxiety, shock and mourning. Focusing on the Trans Day of Remembrance that followed the election, queer grief emerged as a collective practice in which bodies assembled, named their lost ones and recognized each other in defiance. As state-backed infrastructures were destabilized, everyday life glitched: an interruption, that made other relations of dependencies visible, revealing how queer life persists through affective ties, shared vulnerability and collective presence beyond institutional support.