Home SOS. Katherine Brickell
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connected to a women’s relationship to the nation‐state and their killable status functions as an important corrective to what Melissa Wright (2011, p. 726) critiques as ‘the gaps in universalist depictions of the necropolitical and biopolitical forces at play in politics, economics, and culture’. From Wright’s (2011) writing femicide, to broader inter‐disciplinary scholarship on honour killings (Ahmetbeyzade 2008), microfinance suicide (Roy 2012), women in war (Tyner and Henkin 2015), asylum claim‐making (McKinnon 2016), and trans‐sterilisation (Repo 2019), there exists a modest yet growing body of literature that problematises the neglect of gender (and sexuality) in discussions of necropolitics and the shortening of life (see also Alves 2014).
By engaging with precarity, a condition that ‘is coming to be expected and/or accepted in a contemporary world defined by “crisis ordinary”’ (Harris and Nowicki 2018, p. 389), I further explore how people are differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death. Precarity, Judith Butler (2009, p. 25) explains, is politically induced and designates that ‘certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support’ and brings to the fore women’s disproportionate acquaintance with harm. Although precarity has traditionally been considered in terms of formal workplace dynamics and neoliberal restructuring, my research data calls for a more expansive critical geography of precarity that more closely sutures matters of social reproduction, or ‘life’s work’ (Strauss and Meehan 2015, p. 2, emphasis in original); that is: biological reproduction; unpaid production of goods and services in the home; social provisioning through voluntary work directed at meeting community needs; the reproduction of culture and ideology; and the provision of sexual, emotional, and affective services to maintain family and intimate relationships (Hoskyns and Rai 2007).
When it comes to mobilising the concept of precarity in this social reproductive context, Nancy Ettlinger’s (2007, pp. 319 and 324) approach is sympathetic to my own in going beyond precarity as a bounded historical condition. She argues that ‘beyond effects of specific global events and macro structures, precarity inhabits the microspaces of everyday life’ and although no one escapes it ‘one might argue that some people who experience more constraints than others also experience more dimensions of precarity’. Investigating the feminised responsibility for the home and its precarity as a form of gender‐based violence, I push feminist studies forward by addressing a noted gap in literature on the household and social reproduction, and their political economy dynamics in relation to violence (Rai and Elias 2015). Cambodian women, I argue, are framed as naturally endowed with the capacity to manage all that is thrown (sometimes quite literally) at them, and that this is part of the ordinary crisis that women encounter in their survival‐work. Expectations of personal resilience situated as necessary and as culturally appropriate in a Cambodian context mean, therefore, that women are disproportionally affected by domestic violence and forced eviction in both direct and indirect ways.
Home SOS demonstrates that while the home is implicated as an exclusionary and unhomely site of domestic violence and forced eviction in Cambodia, justice is simultaneously premised on (re)claiming the material and ontological security that it nominally affords. Yet it is this very vision of harmonious domestic life that is harnessed in governmental cultural logic and that exerts pressure on women especially to uphold home, and associated gender ideals, under challenging circumstances. In this cultural logic, the structural violence that women contend with is rendered visible. That the home is as much a symbolic as material entity is crucial in thinking through these geographies of violence. Symbolic violence, ‘the power of suggestion which is exerted through things and persons’ (Bourdieu 1991, p.52) has the potential to be lived in, and through, its walls.
In the light of these nuances and inconsistencies, the book connects with longstanding feminist debates on the tensions of romanticising versus rejecting home as an ideal (Varley 2008). It exposes why the home is so important for feminists and at the same time so problematic to valorise. As Eleanor Jupp (2017, p. 350) summarises, home ‘has, of course, been seen as the primary scene of women’s oppression within much feminist analysis. Its realisation has been seen to depend on the subordination of women’s own desires and projects, and exclusion from a public realm, as well as a place potentially of fear and violence.’ But while domestic space has been traditionally attributed to oppressive gender norms that run the danger of enshrining women in a ‘cult of domesticity’ (Safa 1995, p. 42), my own scholarship questions unnuanced and uncritical perspectives that risk delegitimising women’s sense of belonging, worth, and pride tied to their social reproduction of the family. A gender politics raised by the domestic sphere cuts both ways, with there being value in asserting the ‘value of domestic cultures and women’s creative shaping of them’ whilst at the same time avoiding ‘the risk of seeming to derive this tie from some kind of feminine “essence”’ (Fraiman 2017, p. 16).
The research in Home SOS indicates the dangers of foreclosing ideals for women to draw on in situations of domestic violence and/or forced eviction. This is because precarity ‘is directly linked to gender and sexual norms since those of us who do not live our genders and sexualities in “intelligible” ways risk violence, discrimination, harassment and death’ (Johnston 2018, p. 6). African‐American feminists (Collins 1998; hooks 1991) have been especially influential in critiquing assumptions about the home as an oppressive place for women, given discrimination faced in the public sphere. Seminal scholarship by bell Hooks (1991, p. 47) focuses on racialised processes of oppression through slavery and segregation and finds that it is ‘in that “homeplace” most often created and kept by black women, that we had the opportunity to grow and development to nurture our spirits’. Ideals of home that express human values of preservation, safety, and privacy are thus to be defended (Young 2005). This is because for many groups, including ‘the poor or transgendered person, the placeless immigrant or the woman on her own, aspiring to a safe, stable, affirming home doesn’t reinforce hierarchical social relations but is pitched, precisely, against them’ (Fraiman 2017, p.20).
Taking these viewpoints on board, Home SOS goes on to show how domesticity is an important coordinate of public value that can represent and function as a burden, but also as a resource, for those in SOS situations. It has the potential to be simultaneously disempowering and liberating. Research in Mexico by Mario Bruzzone (2017) focuses on Las Patronas, a charitable organisation of women who throw home‐cooked bags of rice and beans to migrants on passing freight trains driven north by poverty and violence. Their cooking not only fulfils gender roles and provides maternal authority, but also becomes a key ingredient in their push for social change. Gender ideals are thus strategically harnessed rather than simply conditioning of their experiences. Women’s ‘extensive domesticity’ (p. 247) thereby becomes a spatial strategy and spatial analytic to forward outward looking and political goals. Explored together in the book, the empirical material on domestic violence and forced eviction reveals how women cope with, and innovate from below, under regimes of bio‐necropower that render their homes and bodies materially, existentially, and socially precarious.
Intimate War and Slow Violence
In the previous section on bio‐necropolitics and precarity, I emphasised the interplay between life and death that women encounter and the importance of these concepts for the empirical analysis that follows. In this next section I concentrate my focus on ideas of intimate war and slow violence in order to probe the attritional dynamics of domestic violence and forced eviction. In regard to the former concept, I argue that domestic violence and forced eviction are expressions of intimate war against women’s homes and bodies located inside and outside of the traditional purview of formally declared war. Developing work that destabilises historic binaries between war versus peace (Gray 2018; Inwood and Tyner 2011; Pain 2015; Sjoberg 2013), the book reveals how the crisis ordinary represents an impasse between these binaries. If the dislocation of the everyday from geopolitics arises from peace being ‘typically read as normal and war as aberration or disruption’ (Cowen and Story 2016, p. 352), then my aim is to show that gender‐based violence and the crisis ordinary complicates any such distinctions. Indeed, together, domestic violence and forced eviction unsettle and break down dualistic lines of thinking between war and not‐war and forefront women’s blurred encounters of them.
Research