The impossibility of home: Conceptualizing home a-making through the Lens of sex work in Italy

Home-making and home unmaking have emerged over the past decade as prevailing concepts to understand the mutually constitutive processes of home creation and its disruption, be it partial or complete, permanent or temporary. However, in such a theoretical framework, there seems to be no conceptual outside of home. This underlying assumption demands greater scrutiny. Drawing on over three years of ethnographic fieldwork on sex work, housing, and inhabitation in Italy, I propose home a-making as a generative concept to theorize all those instances in which the home is not there to be unmade and is not even crafted as a possibility. Home a-making is here conceptualized as a process by which groups of subjects (in this case, sex workers) are deprived of the horizon of home, ontologically—and often materially—expelled from what the home ought to be and signify in society. In thinking of home, the concept of a-making serves to grant a storytelling to those cases of “primitive exclusion” in which the home is not merely a site of violence but is itself constructed as a physical and imaginary space contingent upon the ousting of particular social categories.