Queer inhabitation: gender geography and home-making practices between Rome and Lisbon

This thesis, Queer Inhabitation: Gender Geographies and Home-making Practices between Rome and Lisbon, examines how LGBTQI+ individuals negotiate housing precarity and belonging within Southern European contexts (Rome and Lisbon), shaped by familistic welfare regimes and housing financialisation. Drawing on feminist and queer geographies, it develops the concept of “queer inhabitation” to foreground the embodied, affective, and relational dimensions of dwelling while addressing systemic inequalities. Methodologically, the study proposes ‘affective curatorship’ as a queer and feminist research posture, using embodied and visual tools—mapping, drift walkings, and photovoice—to foster empowerment, community-building, and collective imagination. Empirical findings, organised as curatorial assemblages, highlight non-linear housing trajectories, radical imaginaries of coexistence, comfort/discomfort in public space, and activism as spatial reclamation. The thesis argues that queer inhabitation is both a survival strategy and a site of resistance, offering critical insights into housing, kinship, and care in contexts of growing precarity.