ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses how a regime of citizenship, produced by governmental policies of a neoliberal state, is challenged by the struggles of migrant women who dispute and open the boundaries of the political body. It discusses two interrelated aspects: squatting as a practice that enables the emergence of Muslim migrant women as political subjects and redefines citizenship in a way that challenges the gender hierarchies embedded both in the Italian legal framework and in migrant families. The example of squatting in houses allows us to reflect on what way the experience of squatting redraws and challenges the boundaries between public and private spheres. Squatting is therefore one of a number of collective politicized actions contesting and unsettling the status quo in Italy. In Rome, as well as in the main Italian towns – Turin, Milan and Padua – there is a progressive increase in squatting by single migrants or families.
