Preconceived notions of informal sector work overshadow the meaningful economies of affect that women exist in.

The Western cultural imaginary that the market and intimacy are and ought to remain bounded spheres of human activity–the ‘separate spheres and hostile worlds’ view (Zelizer2005, p. 22)–affects the value of the activities that more visibly transgress it :sex and care work. Their construction as acts and attachments that should not be for sale generates and reproduces an ‘economy of affect’(Richard and Rudnyckyj.2009) which makes certain bodies more likely to perform these activities. In contemporary Western European countries it is indeed largely migrant women who occupy the positions of the carer (see for example Barone and Mocetti2011, Triandafyllidou and Marchetti2013)and the sex worker i.e. the market equivalents of the binary roles of the wife-and-mother or of the prostitute that the heteronormative order reserves to women (Grosz1990, p. 129). The transgression of the (fictitious) boundaries safeguarding the sphere of intimacy from the commodification of its constitutive acts and attachments (hereinafter the market/inti-macy binary) appears to be the condition of possibility of their migratory projects. However, in contexts increasingly characterised by restrictive mobility regimes(Vuolajärvi 2018) and repressive prostitution policies within and across national borders the intersection of work, intimacy and migration gives rise to different hierarchies of visibility and policy concern for the precarious, exploitative and hazardous conditions under which women perform their labour. Following Constable’s invitation to cast ‘the pairing of commodification and intimacy’ as the main topic of analysis (Constable2009, p. 58), and drawing from my ethnographic fieldwork in Italy, in this article I discuss the relationship between work and intimacy in thelives of migrant women for whom the commodification of intimate acts and attachments byand large encapsulates their opportunities to sustain themselves and their transnational intimacies. To this purpose I use Berlant’s concept of ‘cruel optimism’, which she defines as‘a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility’ whereby a subject projects its continuity into an enabling object that is also disabling’(Berlant2006,p.21).For Berlant,‘the conditions of ordinary life in the contemporary world [. . .] are conditionsof the attrition or the wearing out of the subject’(ibid., 23). Hence, in this article I argue that the intricate entanglement–rather than the separation–of sex, care, love and work inmigrant women’s lives constitutes what makes their under-valued, exploitative and risky jobs meaningful and valuable to them, as they pursue their cruelly optimistic attachments toa better life for themselves and their family members. The dire conditions under whichwomen perform sex and care work attest to the workings of intersecting structures of inequality, as inflected (mainly) by gender, class, race and sexuality, and primarily the gendered and racialised (Brah1993) economy of affect engendered by the market/intimacybinary, restrictive mobility regimes and discriminatory prostitution laws. In showing migrant women’s predicaments I aim to contribute to contemporary feminist scholars’ and sex workers rights activists’ debates in academia and policy making spaces on the nature and regulation of prostitution, arguing for rescaling its relationship to harm from an ontological to a phenomenological level. This article is based on my larger ethnographic research project on the relationship between sex, pleasure and the market in processes of women’s subjectification incontemporary Western countries. In 2012–13 I conducted 14 months of fieldwork in Italy, moving across a continuum of spaces of leisure and work wherein Italian andmigrant women consumed and/or commodified their sexual desirability–pole dance schools, discos, strip clubs, and streets where the sale of sex is negotiated. I conducted41 open-ended interviews with women working as pole dance entrepreneurs and/or teachers, burlesquers ,ragazze immagine(image girls),3acrobatic strippers, lap dancers and indoor sex workers, and two with former street sex workers who are now activists working in harm-reduction programmes. Simultaneously, I collaborated for a year with two non-governmental organisations providing sexual and reproductive health infor-mation to street sex workers, and I regularly volunteered in the night-time outreach activities (hereinafter: mobile unit) organised by one of them.4This article brings together the experiences of migrant women occupying different positions in the sphere of commodified intimacy in Italy. The interview with Kate–a young Ukrainian woman working as image girl while in higher education–discloses the predicament of her mother, who travelled to Italy as an undocumented migrant and achieved family reunification with her daughter only after several years of informal employment as a careworker. The field notes from my activities with the mobile unit relay fragments of the conversations between ‘us’ in the van–frequently women, Italian, and in a self-ascribed ‘helping’ role–and the female sex workers whom we reached out to. Power flows across and structures all social situations (Foucault1977), and inevitably shapes the circulation of words, emotions, expectations and silences in the interaction between the researcher and the subjects of her research. I am therefore aware that my position as a white female researcher with Italian (i.e. EU) citizenship influenced my fieldwork, and that the power imbalances were particularly intense in the interaction with the women I encountered while on the mobile unit. This awareness is reflected in my analytic approach to these exchanges as narratives: their value, therefore, does not pertain to the realm of un/truth but to the performative. What they foreground is women’s negotiation of their predicaments in the context of the profound disparities shaping the space between us.The article is structured as follows. First, I trace the workings of intersecting gendered, class-based and racialised hierarchies of power in the economy of affectengendered by the market/intimacy binary. Next I highlight the place and meaning of this trope in feminist and sex workers rights activists’ debates on prostitution. Subsequently, I show how female migrants in Italy navigate care and sex work in contexts characterised by restrictive mobility regimes and discriminatory prostitution laws.