Already Rented: The Difficulty of Access to Housing through the Experiences of Women with a Migrant Background in Sicily.

This paper aims to show the experiences and reflections of 10 women from migrant background on their access to rented houses in Palermo (Sicily) and highlight it as a consequence of the dynamics of power that they face on a daily basis. This dynamics reveal an intersection of subordinations and the complexity of being entangled in a legal and administrative jungle that increases their potential exposure to forms of exploitation and to the risk of experiencing homelessness.

The theoretical framework ranges from some aspects of border studies (Mezzadra & Neilson) to intersectional feminism (Crenshaw, Davis, hooks) and Critical Legal Studies (Bello, Bernardini & Giolo, Rigo), to housing and homemaking studies (Boccagni, Fravega) and studies on touristification phenomena in the local area (Bonafede & Napoli, Picone, Prestileo), seeking to adopt a perspective that allows to observe the transversality of the subject matter.

The core of the paper consists of an analysis of unstructured interviews conducted with 10 women who live, or have lived, in the city of Palermo. In the analysis, I focus on three specific aspects: a) the difficulties of fulfilling the economic and labour requirements of the real estate market and the forms of self-organisation; b) the intersection of forms of discrimination and harassment; c) the impact of the legal status as a result of structural violence.

At the end of the paper, I underline how a general phenomena - the touristification processes - takes shape just as a background. Such processes, through an intersectional lens, do not represent the only key to understanding difficulty in access to housing, but make the absence of public interventions more striking. Instead, what emerges is the production and reproduction of stratified discriminations, at a systemic level, which contributes to make difficult or impossible the access to a fundamental right for certain subjectivities.