Impolitic bodies for liminal economies. Notes to an ethnography at the sexual margins of the nation

Abstract

This contribution examines the case of transgender bodies inhabiting the margins of Rome: bodies experiencing urban lives shaped by irregular migration and chronic dispossession. The paper uses the “paradoxical” figure of the margin as a conceptual framework, and is based on fieldwork notes collected as legal and social workers for grassroots associations supporting migrant sex workers in the city. The subjects encountered embody long-lasting migration paths, mainly from South America, and access services as migrants (thus welcomed or rejected according to the practices of subjectification in asylum law), non-heteronormative subjects, and sex workers. Following these dimensions, we explore how “inclusion politics” produce processes of marginalization, structurally generating deviations from the norm that sustain the moral and aesthetic national rhetorics of “urban decency”. These processes, in fact, produce “surplus” liminal bodies that nevertheless constitute a population economically and symbolically available to the “city-zenship”. Through informal routes and settlements tied to prostitution and migration in Rome, the urban area thrives on what is publicly known as “urban decay”. On the other hand, the city remains a space inhabited by those who have not yet been included. In the margins, these multi-faced subjectivities practice forms of solidarity, and reinterpret their own lives.