Naples, 2032: Visionary Fragments of the Eco‐Transfeminist City

Abstract

Following critical Black studies scholar and activist Walidah Imarisha's (2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzcgpm5rxG8) words, “We can't build what we can't imagine, all organising is science fiction”, this paper investigates the subjective and collective imaginaries about the Southern Italian city of Naples, from the positionalities and desires of transfeminist and environmental justice activists. The paper aims to sketch a transfeminist urban political ecology informed by feminist and queer geographies, and Black feminist futurity. Inscribed in the tradition of militant research and using the Future Archive Method (Zechner 2013, unpublished PhD thesis; Zechner 2014, https://thisappearance.wordpress.com/2014/11/02/the‐future‐archive/), the fragments of a desirable eco‐transfeminist city emerge as an antidote to its reduction to a neoliberal, commercial, commodified function that worsen the already existing, while producing new inequalities, through the emergent strategies of decommodifying time and space, building transfeminist care infrastructures and radical pedagogies. Thence, guided by the fervid imagination of social justice activists, we will time‐travel to Naples in 2032, showing how complex and multi‐layered are the prefigurative politics at the intersection of transfeminism and environmental justice, fighting for so much more than is traditionally defined as pertaining to these movements. Finally, the paper makes a case for the engagement with futurity and speculative methods for a transfeminist urban political ecology.