READING HOUSING AS AN URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE PATTERNING THE ‘WHORE STIGMA’

Abstract In this article, I conceptualize housing as an urban infrastructure enabling the reproduction, exploitation, circulation and emplacement of the ‘whore stigma’. To this end, I engage with infrastructural scholarship, particularly the emerging field of infrastructural housing studies, and situate it in dialogue with critical perspectives on stigma and the geographies of sex work. While geographical debates on stigma have predominantly drawn on Wacquant’s conceptualization of territorial stigmatization, I contend that this framework provides only a partial understanding of the urban distribution of taint. Although stigma is undoubtedly associated with urban concentration, it also materializes and operates at a more granular scale, shaped by a constellation of micro‐level manifestations, deeply intertwined with, and mediated through, housing which—via its affordances, actors, temporalities and associated forms of labour—acts as an infrastructure of disparity. The analysis proposed in this article is informed by findings from three years of ethnographic research, during which I participated as an ally in the Italian sex work movement and conducted in‐depth interviews with several sex workers.