Recent political events across the world have made clear the relevance of the concept of “authoritarian neoliberalism” (Bruff 2014) and the centrality of so called ‘anti-gender’/’anti-woke’ discourse and practices in its construction, usually bringing together place-based (“heteroactivist” according to the definition coined by Browne and Nash, 2017) coalitions of diverse subjects and groups opposing equalities legislation and feminist and queer scholarship.

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Critical scholars across the social sciences have concentrated their attention on heteroactivist discourses, practices and organizations in different regions and countries, especially Eastern Europe (Shevtsova 2023), overlooking counterdiscourses and strategies from the part of feminist and queer groups across scales. This is an urgent task to commit to, since an increasing number of countries is witnessing a rapid increase in discursive and material violence against queer lives, women, feminist and queer knowledge production, and feminist and queer organizations. Aim of the project is, therefore, 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’ possibilities (Muñoz 2009) and support each other.

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Here we use ‘queer’ as an umbrella term to include all those othered by heteronormativity and cisnormativity, i.e., it is more a relational process than a simple identity category (Brown 2007). In line with Pickerill and Chatterton (2006: 730), we define autonomous spaces as those engaged with building “egalitarian and solidaristic forms of political, social, and economic organization through a combination of resistance and creation”.

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Our choice to focus on autonomous urban spaces builds on the vast interdisciplinary literature highlighting the central importance of cities for feminist and queer politics and organizing (Andrucki 2021; Bain and Podmore 2021; Kern 2021; Spruce 2021). Moreover, we believe that, in the context of authoritarian neoliberalism, thanks to the diversity of their populations and their favouring the formation of “cultures of resistance” (Nicholls 2008), cities assume central relevance for the formation of oppositional politics and the possibility of scalar tensions that challenge authoritarian neoliberalism.

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Through four events, the project brings together activist(s and) scholars from Italy and Argentina (and more generally the Mediterranean region and Latin America) to emphasize the importance of knowledge and practices originated outside the Anglo-American world, therefore contributing to a more diverse and inclusionary urban scholarship that thinks cities relationally through elsewhere starting from anywhere (Robinson 2016).