Maddalena Fragnito

Maddalena Fragnito is cultural and media theorist who conducts research at the intersection of feminist theory, postcolonial studies, and political ecology. Her research investigates the proximity between violence and social reproduction, recognizing the crisis of care and environmental depletion as central sites of contemporary conflict. Her work interweaves political theory and feminist epistemology with participatory research and artistic practices, often in continuity with noninstitutional contexts. A constant focus in her work is the study of how care work and reproductive activities are devalued and rendered invisible under capitalist, patriarchal, and colonial conditions, while simultaneously being captured and repurposed by authoritarian regimes. Within this tension, she analyses and enacts practices of insubordination in the fields of care labour, education, and culture in order to foster the emergence of alternative and resistant infrastructures. She has contributed to collaborative platforms such as Pirate Care and the Institute of Radical Imagination, collective spaces for developing vocabularies and practices that generate new political imaginaries from a feminist and anticolonial perspective.

Luxury Bunker Theory: The Militarization of Social Reproduction and Other Supremacist Fantasies

Through the lens of the emerging phenomenon of luxury bunkers, my project examines how economic, political, and cultural systems increasingly render bodies and territories expendable so as to safeguard the “good life” of a privileged few. By shifting the gaze from the global majority to the privileged few – and foregrounding the latter’s pressing question of who will provide care after the “end of the world” – Luxury Bunker Theory reveals how escapist fantasies of the ultrarich deepen global inequalities and reconfigure care as a site of control.
Grounded in feminist and antiracist perspectives, the project explores how ultrarich individuals’ visions of survival shape two critical dynamics: the exacerbation of socioecological reproductive depletion and the militarization of life and social reproductive infrastructures. Through critical discourse and visual analysis, the project investigates how such fantasies define public imaginaries of crisis and reinforce elite monopolies. I question how language and visuals construct apocalyptic scenarios that legitimize infrastructural techno-enclosures through new hierarchies of care.
Within these fortified enclaves, economic status, race, and assertions of “virility” regulate access to resources that are essential for collective survival. Contextually, luxury bunkers are analysed not merely as architectural structures but as material and ideological prototypes for exclusionary governance. They function as cultural objects embodying intersecting inequalities of class, gender, and race, while sustaining fantasies of self-sufficiency, dominant masculinity, and technocratic control.

2024 PhD Media and Gender Studies, Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University, Coventry, United Kingdom
2019 Advanced Course in Critical Theory, Bicocca University, Milan, Italy
2004 BA/MA Performing Arts, Brera Art Academy, Milan, Italy

Coordinator of the Art Module of the Master’s programme in Gender Studies at Roma Tre University

Scuola senza fine. L’esperienza delle 150 ore femministe (School Without End: The Feminist Experience of Italy’s 150 Hours Decree). Bologna: DeriveApprodi, forthcoming.
“Care Necropolitics: And How to Dismantle the Master’s House”. In International Handbook of Queer Death Studies, edited by Nina Lykke, Tara Mehrabi, and Marietta Radomska. London: Routledge, 2025.
with Chiara Luce Breccia, Brunella Casalini, Federica Giardini, Melania Moltelo, and Cristina Morini. Prospettive della cura: Politiche e critiche femministe tra cura e riproduzione sociale (Care Perspectives: Politics and Feminist Critiques Between Care and Social Reproduction). Rome: Manifesto Libri, 2025.