Infrastructural love and trans mutual aid in spain
affects, care, and the struggle against antigender panic
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.46661/relies.13015Keywords:
infrestructural love, mutual aid, trans activism, care, veridcitionAbstract
This article advances the concept of infrastructural love to theorize a set of affective and material practices that sustain trans life in contexts of precarity and anti-gender panic in Spain. Rather than treating love as a private emotion or depoliticized moral value, it is conceptualized as a social and epistemopolitical infrastructure that organizes concrete conditions of survival, habitability, and credibility. Engaging with affect theory, feminist care frameworks, and critical trans studies, the article examines how trans mutual aid networks generate forms of support that exceed the liberal paradigm of rights. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of practices developed between 2019 and 2025—including support groups, resistance funds, crowdfunding campaigns, and community archives—the article shows how love becomes institutionalized “from below” in response to the insufficiency or withdrawal of the state. These practices not only redistribute material resources but also produce everyday accompaniment, collective protection, and social credibility in contexts where trans lives are systematically questioned. The article argues that love operates as infrastructure when it organizes circuits of redistribution, affective memory, and epistemopolitical contestation against regimes of veridiction that demand coherence and proof to recognize gendered existence. Within this framework, love is not a normative ideal but a material and symbolic battleground where decisions are made about which lives are sustained, believed, and allowed to exist.
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