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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.