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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how homeless women living in a Hong Kong pedestrian tunnel negotiate gendered urban marginality. Through acts of ‘making home’ and resistance to state cleansing, their subterranean domesticities reveal how care and agency persist within a polarised city.

Paper long abstract

This paper engages with the panel’s concern for space, displacement, and resistance in the polarised global city. It examines how gendered forms of urban marginality are lived and contested through the experiences of three women who inhabit a pedestrian tunnel in Hong Kong. Their ‘underground’ existence exposes the structural violence embedded in urban governance: municipal workers routinely ‘cleanse’ the tunnels, erasing traces of habitation under the guise of hygiene and order. It also reveals the moral hierarchies and social stigma that define who belongs above ground. Yet their narratives and spatial practices refuse this erasure.

Through ethnographic attention to their material practice of hoarding, the paper explores how these women produce alternative modes of dwelling and political presence. The accumulation of objects, often dismissed as disorder, operates instead as a ‘technology of the self’ that reclaims agency and moral worth within a hostile metropolis. By turning a space of passage into a precarious yet defiant home, these women reveal how the polarised city is constantly negotiated from below. The paper thus situates the underground as a critical site where resistance, care, and material reconfiguration intersect to challenge the spatial logics of exclusion.