In liminal spaces, queer survival manifests itself into Messiness – an undoing of preconceived notions of survivability through demanding space and disorderly stepping through the temporality of life on the margin.

Furthermore, and relatedly, despite its importance for survival and its imbrication with mobility, work has been given surprisingly little attention in both queer migration and trans scholarship. Following emerging work on the queering of political economy (Lewis and Irving 2017) and of sexual economies (Smith 2015; Mai 2018), the paper responds to a need for scholarship that centres trans work as labour, and that roots work (including sex work) in the context of everyday, marginal survival. In this sense, while there is important emerging critical scholarship on migrant trans sex workers (for example, Mai 2018; Maldonado Macedo 2020), the absence of research on trans work as labour in a broader sense means to an extent that the transsexualization of sex work (Prada et al. 2012) is reinforced, and that sex work is perpetuated as the analytical lens through which trans labour is viewed. Here I am interested in putting sex work into broader perspective within the context of trans working lives, and in turn to shed light on the material realities of making a “queer” living. That messy survival is enacted in the margins is not incidental. On the contrary, if marginality is seen not as isolation or exclusion from the centre, but rather as the meeting of centre and periphery, then the margins are a productive zone of contact (indeed, might the structure of all things not be seen as most meaningful, and powerful, at their edges, in encounter with the other?). This contact, when imbued with power and scale, becomes a productive friction (see Tsing 2005): dynamic, harmful, transformative. In this way, the margins may be seen as sites of negotiation and navigation, of engagement and resistance (Hooks 1989). Through a queer lens, such an understanding of the margins brings to mind the “negotiations we make in seeking to fashion our existences” (Romesburg 2012, 120), and it underpins the realities of messy survival. This notion of navigation also informs how marginal mobilities are understood here, resonating strongly with Rogaly’s (2015) observation that there is no hierarchy in experiences of spatial mobility: a short-distance move or a set of everyday mobilities might be as meaningful (and/or harmful) to an individual as an international journey. Moreover, from a critical mobilities perspective, migrant mobility may be framed as on-going, complex, inherently unjust, and as much to do with fixity and stasis as flows and movement (e.g. Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006). In this sense, a less normative approach to mobility is useful in disrupting conventional migration and asylum narratives and framing mobility “as neither a privilege nor a predicament, but an engagement and entanglement with the lived environment that influences our outlooks and maneuverings” (Bjarnesen and Vigh 2016, 13). Vigh’s (2006, 14) concept of social navigation as “the tactical movement of agents within a moving element”, as “motion within motion” speaks eloquently to the realities of marginal mobility at different scales. This not only evokes the idea of the constant flux of displacement, but also – echoing the discussion of marginality above – frames agency in a more nuanced way, as a kind of spatial–temporal assemblage. In this way, movement as navigation may be just as messy as the celebrated messiness (Love 2016) of the subjects of queer theory. An important part of this messiness is certainly temporal, in terms of acute uncertainty for those on the move, “that inspires action as much as it constrains it” (Bjarnesen 2009, 131), and the unpredictability of migration governance (Griffiths 2014). But beyond this, an explicitly queer, trans framing is needed here. Useful in this regard is first, Romesburg’s (2012) historical account of “the magnetic effects of innovative agency and immanent foreclosure” (119) in the life of comic and female impersonator Rae Bourbon’s and the mobilities they pursued “to belong meaningfully in the world” (121). The account sheds light on “how trans moves us” in both spatial and affective ways, noting that “those striving to produce livable lives beyond the confines of heteronormative fusions of sex/gender/sexuality congruence need all the tools they can deploy” (120). Second, making the case for queer (migrant) lives to be read as “messy”, Manalansan IV (2014, 99) finds that “mess provides a vibrant analytical frame and a visceral phenomenological grip on the exigencies of marginalized queers – especially those who do not occupy the valorized homonormative spaces of the contemporary West”. Moving away from “necropolitical/necrophilic accounts” to focus on the “‘aliveness’ of these [working class immigrant] queers” (2014, 100), they see mess not as limited to queer bodies, objects, and desires, but also – significantly – as related to processes, behaviours, and situations. In line with the understanding of margins outlined above, aliveness may also be read as radical survival: as resistance which ruptures necropolitical orders of death and violence, through practices of survival which allow hope for the future to also stay alive (Lucero Rojas 2020). In turn, then, here the idea of messy survival speaks to the unexpected, contradictory, disorderly and uncertain ways of “living on (Perl 2019) in the face of profoundly harmful injustice. It echoes the ways in which, as Romesburg (2012, 120) notes, quality of life in part “gets achieved through demanding, by the practice of our own messy lives, something more”, and specifically uses this framework to explore the intersections between work, mobility and trans subjectivity.