This dissertation examines how stories about refugees can dissent from the predictable narrative of persecution and suffering expected of them without disregarding the violence involved in their displacement. The refugee has become a discursive category framing an abstracted and depoliticized figure of protection, one that in the last decade has been used in opposition to the migrant understood as a burden. As with all lives, the experiences of refugees exceed the categories imposed on them. Their specificity is that their excess threatens a disturbance of the international order. They are framed as a temporary even if inevitable exception until normalcy – citizenship – is restored. The analysis connects the making of refugeeness to a stable language that guarantees predictability in a system of states in which movement must be controlled. It then shows that even the most categorical language depends on ambivalence that can destabilize rigid meanings, although those are captured again. Suggesting that language is key to questioning the spatial regulative ideal of political belonging, the dissertation examines fictional and non-fictional prose, feature films and documentaries that, in the last ten years and in different countries, have created more unstable representations of refugees, rearranging their spatial and cognitive places. Through a close look at the narratives, their plots, characters and formal choices, the dissertation shows how unbecoming refugees live in ways other than the expected role of passive victims, unmaking refugeeness. Building on debates about visibility/invisibility, boundaries and agency fostered by the stories, the analysis begins with a discussion on the difficulty of abandoning categories that are still needed to justify protection and proceeds to the possibility of reframing refugees narratives by bringing imagination to life, a politicizing practice that is constitutively absent from the figure of the refugee.