Resistance and Everyday Life: A Women’s Struggle for the Right to Housing in Lisbon

In 2016, a group of 16 working-class families were menaced of eviction from a privately owned building in Lisbon’s historical city centre, which was heavily impacted by gentrification and tourism-related activities. They initiated a struggle led by 3 women residents. Based on an ethnographic approach focusing on the actions, thoughts, and emotions of these three women, this chapter discusses the entanglement of urban social and material structures and people’s practices and meanings, as suggested by the notion of ordinary affects. I analyse how everyday practices effectively contaminate political practice and how everyday resistance can spark the formation of new political subjectivities. The analysis is anchored on the idea that urban political struggles are closely associated with everyday life and that the reasons for engaging in action go beyond the structure of opportunities, they are spacialized and embedded in people’s biographies, emotions, and ties.