Italian Queer Transfeminism Towards a Gender Strike

Abstract

AbstractIn this chapter, I review a number of projects stemming from the transfeminist movement, with particular attention to Italy and a focus on the iconic practice of the gender strike. After an introduction to the field and its genealogy, I analyse examples of activism related to academic labour and gender labour that adopt a materialist analysis of the construction of gendered and sexual subjectivity. I argue that, ultimately, queer transfeminist critiques coalesce around the call for a gender strike as a way to interrupt both the extraction of value resulting from the production of genders and the violence of the social obligation to reproduce binary genders. As such, this strategy of mobilization, I argue, highlights the collective potentials and individual limits of the capacity to choose.