Home SOS. Katherine Brickell
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crisis‐management work of domestic violence and forced eviction is therefore replete with (further) risks of bodily depletion.
On these grounds, there is unexhausted conceptual merit in thinking through intersections between survival‐work and slow violence. Interdisciplinary feminist work also has an important role to play in advancing geographical literatures on crisis and emergency that are showing an accelerated pace of interest in slow violence (as recent examples, see Anderson et al. 2019; Brydolf‐Horwitz 2018; Rydstrom 2019; Pain 2019). These examples emphasise how ‘psychic and physical attenuation and deterioration are part of the ongoingness of ordinary life’ which ‘allows us to decouple the concept of slow emergencies from the concept of the event, or more precisely one particular mode of eventfulness associated with the sensational and the spectacular’ (Anderson et al. 2019, p. 11). Feminist perspectives can really push, probe, and propel the theorising and addressing of masculinist practices, connected drivers, and social relations of the crisis ordinary (e.g. patriarchy and capitalism) that structure these attenuations and deterioriations from a gendered perspective. The survival‐work that is the crisis ordinary represents an important conceptual route to register the social reproductive labour that sustains and, in certain circumstances, challenges the chronicity of domestic crises.
Bio‐necropolitics and Precarity
If the crisis ordinary and survival‐work draws closer attention to women’s experiences of home life, then bio‐necropolitics and precarity bring governmentality into ever greater view. Domestic violence and forced eviction are neglected yet essential parts of debate on bio‐necropolitics. While ‘biopolitical powers work to manage, order and foster life for citizens worthy of protection, such powers work in tandem with necropolitical powers that produce death for those destined to abandonment, violence and neglect’ (Lamble 2013, p. 242). Taking on board recognition of biopower and necropolitics as ‘two sides of the same coin’ in which ‘the explosion of discursive interest in the politics of life itself, in other words, affects also the geo‐political dimension of death and killing’ (Braidotti 2013, p. 9), the book facilitates discussion on women’s experiences of home lived at the edges of life and death. It draws on, and encourages, feminist thinking on the home and female body as a privileged target for the power‐techniques and power‐relations of male‐centred systems of exploitation (Federici 2004).
In his seminal post‐colonial writing, Achille Mbembé (2003, p. 40) outlines the parameters of necropolitics and anchors it to ‘the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death‐worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (emphasis in original; see also Mbembé 2019).2 According to Thom Davies, Isakjee, and Dhesi (2017, pp. 5–6), necropolitics arose as a ‘reaction to the inadequacy of biopower to conceptualize the more extreme cases of body regulation, when life was not so much being governed, as much as death itself was being sanctioned’. For Michel Foucault (1997), biopolitics was foregrounded on the social body as an object of power whose life is secured, managed, regulated, and intervened in, through regimes of authority. Matters of biopolitics, therefore, intimately relate to care, marriage, and family in which human life exists inside, rather than outside, political processes. Foucault’s theoretical propositions, however, have been criticised for being too rooted in discursive practice rather than social and economic relations that identify the source and motivations of power techniques to administer and promote life (Federici 2004). Foucault also had little to say about the politics of letting die, ‘why governing authorities would elect not to intervene when they could, or select one subset of the population for life enhancement while abandoning another’ (Li 2010, p. 66). Mbembé (2003) emphasises, therefore, the importance of looking at the ‘work of death’ so its threat is better heeded as a prevailing technique of governance.
The stories of domestic violence and forced eviction told in Home SOS include both literal physical death and also social death, as well as trade‐offs made between them by women and other actors. That domestic violence and forced eviction warrant placing in this life‐threatening register is reflected in statements by the United Nations:
In the most extreme cases, violence against women can lead to death. Two thirds of victims of intimate partner/family related homicides are women
(United Nations 2015, np).
In addition to being a violation of the prohibition on arbitrary or unlawful interference with the home, forced evictions all too often result in other severe human rights violations, particularly when they are accompanied by forced relocation or homelessness. For instance, if no adequate alternative housing is provided, victims of forced evictions are put in life‐ and health‐threatening situations
(United Nations 2014, p. 1).
Embracing a feminist geopolitical perspective which remedies how ‘state and statecraft are treated as abstract forces that float above the contingencies of everyday lives and spaces’ (Coleman 2009, p. 904), I bring the home into greater bio‐necropolitical contention by considering women’s killable homes and bodies. That the home is the most likely place globally for a woman to be killed (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) 2018) renders this task especially prescient. While ‘life and the home are so intertwined that it is almost impossible to think about one without the other’ (Desmond 2016, p. 300), death also has an intimate embrace that requires belated exploration. Scholarship on domicide, ‘the deliberate destruction of home against the will of the home dweller’, is a rare exception in its direct focus on the ‘murder of home’ (Porteous and Smith 2001, p. 3). The destruction of home, Porteous and Smith argue, causes ‘loss of historical connection; a weakening of roots; and partial erasure of the sources of memory, dreams, nostalgia and ideals’ (p. 63). Uncomfortable with the finality of homes unmade in their book, and its lack of nuanced analysis on the impacts of home loss, I pursue a more processual, agentic, and gender‐differentiated course (see also Nowicki 2014 for a critique).
In the interplay captured between life and death, Home SOS shows the variable disposability attached to Cambodian women and their homes by a government apparatus that places onus on marriages staying together in situations of domestic violence, and those that are ‘just’ collateral damage in the case of forced eviction. The former is deemed more biopolitically worthy, grievable, and less disposable than the latter, which are surplus to, and obstructive of, capitalist accumulation. Yet despite these differences between the management of domestic violence and forced eviction, both require women to take on the burden of ‘upholding the work of death’ (Mbembé 2003, p. 13) by (further) risking bodily integrity to ensure the security of others, be this a spouse, children, community, and/or the nation. Chapter 1 introduced, for example, how the enhancement and protection of Cambodian government interests and priorities are predicated on the sequestering of others, but particularly women’s homes and bodies. Together, domestic violence and forced eviction demonstrate the (attempted) appropriation of bodies and homes that are variously constituted as surplus and intrinsic to accumulation. Only through the analytical collision of domestic violence and forced eviction is it possible to produce a nuanced account of women’s homes, marriages, and bodies subjected to the differentiated manoeuvres of, and grievable statuses given by, governmental actors.
Withstanding the ‘fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life’ (Katz 2001, p. 711) being the constituent matter of the book, I provide pointed insights into the instrumentalisation of the home by the Cambodian government in order to push women to conform and submit to patriarchal and bio‐necropolitical power. Government expression of sovereignty resides, in this remit, in the fantasy, capacity, and power to dictate who lives and who dies. Protracted situations and impacts of domestic violence and forced eviction can work to keep women in a permanent state of injury stuck in, or dislodged from, the home. The crisis ordinary becomes, in this context, a compensatory practice and status vacillating in between the home as a locus of life and death.