In this guest post, Cesare Di Feliciantonio (Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy), Magdalena Moreno (National University of Tres de Febrero, Argentina), and Gabriella Palermo (Università di Palermo, Italy) introduce their Project Feminist and queer autonomous urban spaces under authoritarian neoliberalism: sharing knowledge and practices between the Mediterranean region and Latin America funded by a Seminar Series Awards grant. A series of events will run from late 2025 to February 2027. Stay tuned for opportunities to engage!
Our project “Feminist and queer autonomous urban spaces under authoritarian neoliberalism: sharing knowledge and practices between the Mediterranean region and Latin America” is the result of the increasing attacks against queer (especially trans) people, equalities and academic knowledge around gender and sexualities that have been witnessed internationally. These attacks show how ‘anti-gender’ discourses and practices represent a pillar of ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’, i.e. those governments that “seek to marginalize, discipline and control dissenting social groups and oppositional politics rather than strive for their explicit consent or co-optation” (Bruff and Tansel 2019: 234), as manifested in different countries around the world, e.g. Argentina, Hungary, Italy, the UK, the US, and Turkey. The sexual politics of authoritarian neoliberalism follow right-wing nationalist movements opposing gender and LGBTQ+ equalities and calling for conservative, essentialized gender and sexual norms, often in combination with assertions of racial, ethnic, or religious majoritarianism. Geographers Kath Browne and Catherine J. Nash (e.g. 2017; 2020) have coined the term ‘heteroactivism’ to account for the variety of subjects and groups coming together in specific locations and across scales to oppose equality discourse and legislation. The combination of heteroactivist discourses and authoritarian neoliberal politics is leading to an increasing discursive and material violence against queer and women’s lives, knowledge production and social organisations.
Therefore, the aim of the project is to create an international network of activist(s and) scholars working in/with feminist and queer autonomous urban spaces, to share knowledge and practices to navigate the increasing violence of the present, imagine new ‘world-making’ practices (Muñoz 2009) and support each other.
More specifically, the project is positioned within, and works with, Italian and Argentinian feminist and queer initiatives and spaces to emphasise the importance of knowledge and practices originating outside the Anglo-American world. It thus contributes to a more diverse and inclusionary urban scholarship that thinks cities relationally through elsewhere, starting from anywhere. Italy has been a laboratory for authoritarian neoliberalism well before the election of the current Meloni government, with a long-standing history of contested sexual politics. As critical scholars, we choose to situate Italy not in Southern Europe but in the Mediterranean region as a political and epistemological stance to highlight its being in between dichotomous categories (e.g. North/South, Minority/Majority World). Latin America has also been a longstanding laboratory for authoritarian neoliberalism, but the violence of the current Milei administration in Argentina makes the study of authoritarian neoliberalism and its sexual politics extremely urgent. This violence has been expressed, among others, in economic adjustments for the working class, violent repression of social protest, and the shutting down of public programmes aimed at improving the lives of queer people (such as the trans employment quota) and fighting against gender-based violence. In addition, violent rhetoric from the highest political authorities has resulted in physical violence against queer, and women in urban spaces.
The project includes four events. The first, “The anti-gender politics of authoritarian neoliberalism”, was a two-half-day online workshop. It aimed at setting the foundations for the in-person events, giving participants the opportunity to connect and start building common vocabularies. Moreover, it allowed participants to strengthen their knowledge about authoritarian neoliberalism and heteroactivism thanks to keynote presentations from established scholars in the field.
The second event (Buenos Aires, second week of Feb 2026) will allow participants to visit different feminist and queer urban spaces that are resisting the current phase of authoritarian neoliberalism. The focus will be on three major topics that have been under attack since day 1 of the current Milei-Villaruel government: the sustainability of life and social reproduction; Comprehensive Sex Education (CSE); and legislative gains for women and queer people. As part of the planned activities, there will be a workshop led by the artivist collective ‘Tango queer’, allowing participants to explore the connections between creative queer expression and urban resistance against both market pressures and heteroactivism.
The third event will be a summer school to be held in Palermo in September 2026. Organised in close collaboration with several local grassroots initiatives, it aims at creating a collective space for imagining and generating transfeminist transformative responses to the violent present through a combination of seminars, workshops, assemblies, urban walks and field visits, reading groups and shared (creative) writing.
The final event of the series will be a conference to be held in Rome in February 2027. It will bring together activist(s and) scholars to share knowledge and practices from different places, while also learning from field visits to different feminist and queer autonomous spaces in the city (e.g. Cagne Sciolte, Communia, Lucha Y Siesta). A prominent topic of discussion will be the relation with formal institutions, especially in relation to issues such as gender-based violence and queer homelessness.
Through these events (and a series of collaborative outcomes in different formats), the project will push against the delegitimization of (trans)feminist and queer knowledge and politics, contributing to a more inclusive and diverse urban scholarship that acknowledges the central role of cities (both politically and socially) in resisting the violence of the present, while creating situated transnational support networks.