Paper short abstract:

I will engage with experiences of queer mutualism in urban Italy during the first year of the covid-19 pandemic as a starting point for reflections on how care is being reclaimed, re-imagined, and redefined by queer social movements as central to political and community life.

Paper long abstract:

By focusing on activist experiences of queer mutualism in Bologna (IT) during the covid-19 pandemic, I will reflect on new understandings of care as central to social movements and political life.

Queer mutualism in Italy is historically connected to HIV activism, workers mutual aid networks, CAVs (anti-violence shelters), and to reflections on other intimacies and queer social reproduction; but it gained new relevance during the pandemic. Queer mutual aid networks are tied not only to political claims for welfare changes and care reconfiguration, but as well as to a discursive shift towards a stronger understanding of queerness as a shared material position rather than an identarian category. Indeed, the renewed centrality of mutualism and care in queer discourses highlights aspects of inner and outer lines of class divisions, material and symbolic marginalization and exclusion from mainstream “care” sites and circuits.

Discourses around queer mutualism rendered possible the re-conceptualization and development of counter-narratives of care as conflictual, collective, counter-hegemonic, challenging the unfortunate association of care with (state-medical) repression, which often emerged during the lockdown periods, even within leftist movements. Engaging with needs, desires, and struggles of queer people in the pandemic, mutual aid initiatives pointed at the equal importance of material and immaterial (affective-social-sexual-political) needs, to the need to challenge the narratives around home, family and stable affects as the sole site for care and support – coming from a queer marginal and marginalized position.