Queer mobilities and the work of messy survival

Within an emerging body of work on queer mobilities, a marked interest in sexuality and migration/asylum has left ample room to consider the complex experience of everyday mobility and displacement. In addition, despite its centrality to survival and its imbrication with mobility, this work has been given little attention in queer migration and trans scholarship. Based on detailed narratives created over a number of years with two Central American trans women as they continue to move, the paper explores the ways in which material and social realities of work shape and are shaped by marginal queer(ed) mobility. It proposes the idea of messy survival to explore the complex navigation of marginal existence, and uses this to explore the intersections between work, mobility and trans subjectivity, arguing that this framework is a useful means of engaging with the gap between how trans, mobile lives are written, and how they are lived.