Home SOS. Katherine Brickell
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2014, p. 98). Reflecting the wider centrality of marriage in Asia (Piper and Lee 2016), figures record that the proportion of women in Cambodia who have never married decreases with age to a low of only 4% among those aged 45–49 (NIS et al. 2014, p. 98). While this ubiquity does not mean that I exclude other perspectives and voices from the data in the book, it does mean that Home SOS foregrounds the violences visited upon, and told through, the narratives of middle‐aged women who have been, at one point, in a spousal relationship.
Third, each of the projects outlined has been driven by a commitment to in‐depth qualitative research, namely interviews, to better understand ‘geographies that wound’ (Philo 2005) both in terms of their affliction and treatment. In the face of what Russell Hitchings (2012) has identified in human geography as a growing hesitance about interviews to research everyday life, I reaffirm the vital and enduring role of ‘talk’ for learning about domestic life and its ruptures. This falls in line with feminist geographical research which has a long history of engagement with interviews (Longhurst 2016). Given potential suppression and eradication of victims’ capacity for speech within and beyond the Cambodian family, interviews encourage the narration of stories to communicate their experiences. These recorded Khmer language interviews were transcribed and then translated verbatim into English by research assistants I worked closely with in each project. In my doctoral research, I had a basic command of Khmer, and worked with two male interpreters who were students at the time, and who supported my broad‐brush explorations of household life. Female research assistants undertook the marriage dissolution and forced eviction research with me. Meanwhile, following World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines on the ethical conduct of research on domestic violence, the interview team in the larger DV law study included one male and one female research assistant who carried out the research with male and female respondents (respectively) after a period of training, piloting, and initial in‐the‐field supervision. At the start of each interview informed‐consent was recorded on the digital voice recorder, and with my more sensitive postdoctoral research, it was explained to respondents that if at any point they felt distressed and wanted to change the subject (or stop the interview), then this was acceptable. Information on NGO assistance was additionally given to two participants who requested legal help in the DV law study.
Structure of the Book
In the next chapter I continue to set up the conceptual parameters through which the interconnected fires of domestic violence and forced eviction can be best understood. Chapter 2 brings into dialogue scholarship on the crisis ordinary with bio‐necropolitics and precarity, intimate war and slow violence, law and lawfare, and rights to dwell. It therefore harnesses and aims to advance a diverse yet synergistic set of theories from geography and cognate disciplines to impress the political significance of threatened homes, women’s survival-work, and the paramountcy of gender‐based violence.
Chapter 3 provides information on Cambodia’s turbulent history and some of the key social‐spatial continuities and junctures of change being witnessed in the country today. The chapter thereby grounds the book in the political economy of Cambodia. As feminist scholars argue, political economy matters; it ‘highlights the patterns of material power and relationships that profoundly affect both the prevalence of violence and insecurity and the efforts to eliminate them’ (True 2012, p. 7; Elias and Roberts 2018). Just as violence within the family ‘is a multifaceted phenomenon grounded in the interplay among personal, situational, and social cultural factors’ (Heise 1998, p. 262), so too are the paths of domestic violence and forced eviction interventions embedded in, and mediated by, an environment of interconnected factors (Adelman 2004; Brickell 2015; Fulu and Miedema 2015; Sjoberg 2015; True 2012). As I advance through the book, domestic violence and forced eviction are present and felt in the home precisely because of their rooting in other sites and scales of power (Pain and Staeheli 2014). Detailing some of the ‘political and institutional context in which the production of precarity occurs’ (Waite 2009, p. 421, emphasis in original) is therefore core to the aims of Chapter 3.
Chapters 4, 5, and 6 present the empirical material collected. In each I draw out commonalities and differences between the rights violations of domestic violence and forced eviction. My aim is to provide the reader with an ongoing and at times heightened sense of tension, dissonance, irony, and anger as the two unfold against each other in respect to their SOS calls (Chapter 4), responses (Chapter 5), and outcomes (Chapter 6). These are long and at times overwhelming chapters, which are shaped by the gravity of the subject matter and the weight of empirical material from both domestic violence and forced eviction victims on their experiences.
More specifically, Chapter 4 pursues a bio‐necropolitical reading of contemporary Cambodia to explore women’s narratives of domestic violence and forced eviction. Their narratives attest to truncated homes and lives subject to political abjection. I explore how these domestic crises are intimate wars that Cambodian women traverse through diverse encounters with death: from suicidal contemplation and suicide; avoiding and/or dwelling in social death; feeling like the living dead; to enduring feticide (the destruction of a foetus). The chapter is attentive to the resilience shown by women (and a number of featured men) in situations of domestic violence and forced eviction and how this survival-work is formative of the crisis ordinary.
Chapter 5 critically examines the actors and mechanisms through which the violences detailed in Chapter 4 have been responded to. While in the case of domestic violence I centre on the official state‐sanctioned recourse to new legislation, my attention to forced eviction pivots on unsanctioned and creative routes to official redress via women’s grassroots activism. I explore both these refusals for ‘fire’ to be contained to the home and study the extra‐domestic spaces of parliament, the courts, and the street to pursue this. I thereby focus on the (un)invited and (un)eventful spaces of resistance of citizenship that have emerged from the home as an expansive and multi‐dimensional space of political and legal significance. The chapter’s focus on the different meanings given, commitments made, and actions taken to address domestic violence and forced eviction forms the groundwork for Chapter 6, which analyses their outcomes for women’s lives.
Chapter 6 shows how women’s experiences of violence can galvanise resistance but that this can also heighten their exposure to further violence and jeopardise their survival. Here I demonstrate the significance of law and lawfare for understanding the consequences of the survival-work explored in the two chapters preceding it.
Chapter 7 provides the conclusion to the book and summates how the home and the women they notionally shelter are imbued with variable levels and logics of disposability and grieveability by the Cambodian government and society in general. The myriad violences that women are encountering, I conclude, are not accidental to the governance of contemporary Cambodia but are central to its functioning. Domestic violence and forced eviction are, therefore, not unrelated typologies of gender‐based violence. They are interrelated oppressions and brutalisations of domestic life that gravitate and retrain multiple subfields of geography on to the home sphere as a public–private hybrid worthy of energised study.
Endnotes