Home SOS. Katherine Brickell
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fail to adequately question the most common forms of violence, the elephantine violence that occurs daily.’ The gendered ‘battlefield’ of everyday life remains typically ignored, despite the fact that ‘gender links violence at different points on a scale reaching from the personal to the international’, and connecting ‘battering and marital rape, confinement, “dowry” burnings, honor killings, and genital mutilation in peacetime; military rape, sequestration, prostitution, and sexualized torture in war’ (Cockburn 2004, p. 43). ‘Looking at where women are and where gender is’ shows, therefore, ‘that war, terrorism and insecurity are as often in the bedroom as on the battlefield, as often in the family home as in houses of government’ (Sjoberg and Gentry 2015, p. 358 emphasis in original). Domestic violence and forced eviction reveal these spatial entanglements between war and the intimacies of everyday life.
Extending this line of thought, the study of intimate war is not just about reorienting the site of scholarly analysis to the home; it is being attentive to its enactment via, and to the detriment of, the home and its inhabitants. Given that localised instances of violence need to be thought of as part of a wider assemblage of space (Springer 2011a), the grounding of the book in the extra‐domestic illuminates how domestic violence and forced eviction are marked by their rootedness within, and connections to, wider sites and processes of power. For example, Rachel Pain’s (2015, p. 64) work contends that domestic violence and international warfare are part of a ‘single complex’ with intimate war denoting ‘not a term for one or the other, but a description of both’. Intimate war, she argues, ‘gains its devastating potential precisely because it does not concern strangers, but people in relationships that are often long term’ (p. 67). Her research on the dynamics of domestic violence in suburban Scottish homes reveals similarities with modern warfare including tactics of shock and awe, hearts and minds, cultural and psychological occupation, just war, and collateral damage.
In Home SOS, I contend that domestic violence and forced eviction inflict these kinds of physical but also emotional wounds against women’s bodies and social relationships in the home because of their long‐term duration and legacies rooted in intimacies of knowing, loving, and caring. Intimacy relates strongly, though not exclusively, to the affective space of the home and the interiority of family life lived in it (Valentine and Hughes 2012). That crisis is ‘an illogical departure’ from a norm and ‘serves the practice of unveiling supposed underlying contradictions’ (Roitman 2013, pp. 11 and 9) brings to the fore the tension and chasm between the home as a site of intimacy and violence. My own adoption of the spatial metaphor ‘intimate war’ allows for the relationship between domestic violence, forced eviction, and war to be made more proximate through the analysis that follows. It is a ‘countertopography’ that ‘demonstrates the rich insights to be gained by interrogating state‐sanctioned violence via everyday, domestic, family, and community‐based dynamics, as opposed to, or in connecting with, a traditional focus on formal, public, “P”olitical realms’ (Faria 2017, p. 14; see also Little 2019).
Intimate war, akin to the crisis ordinary, instils recognition that violence and the survival‐work it necessitates have become domesticated and routinised within women’s ‘ordinary’ practices. This approach is an important one given that domestic violence and forced eviction are becoming lived as ‘regularized warfare’ (Mbembé 2003) in times of official peace – their intensification fuelled by the political and economic mechanisms of capitalism’s dominance in cahoots with patriarchal control (Federici 2018b). Domestic violence, for example, is still tolerated by the courts and police as a legitimate response to women’s noncompliance in their domestic duties – from child‐rearing, food provisioning and preparation, laundering and cleaning – which should enable male freedom to participate in formal production outside of the household. Forced eviction, meanwhile, paves the way for ‘new enclosures’ by involuntarily removing women from their homes, land, and even marriages.
Mbembé’s (2003, p. 27, emphasis in original) interpretation that sovereignty ‘means the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not’ thus warrants a spatial turn by questioning the ‘where’ of disposability in this intimate war. When places and bodies stand in the way of capitalist logics, violence and oppression are the likely outcome. Silvia Federici (2018b, p. 51) posits, for example, that escalations of violence against women rooted in the capitalist, patriarchal order, are essential to a ‘new global war’ against women ‘because of what women represent in their capacity to keep their communities together’. This is especially pertinent to the home, normatively understood as a shared space of intimacy and belonging. Not only does Federici argue that the newly emergent political economy fosters more violent familial relations but also that a new surge of violence has roots in new forms of capital accumulation that involves land dispossession and the necessity to attack women in order to achieve this. As a result, ‘precarity and resilience are the twin logics of a neoliberal order that abandons populations in pursuit of profit and then seeks to naturalize those abandonments as the only possible course of action’ (Masco 2017, p. S73). Home SOS therefore roots and routes Federici’s work on the global phenomena of war against women’s bodies within, and through, the domestic sphere. These are embodied struggles that should be central, rather than peripheral, to debates on violence, patriarchy, and the deprivation of shelter. As Michele Lancione (2019a, p. 5) asks,
Why are the efforts of millions of women fighting to live within their homes relegated to the rubric of ‘empowerment’ and ‘capabilities’, or registered only within the remit of feminist debates, rather than being seen as part of a quintessential fight to liberate housing from its patriarchal, masculine, violent ethos?
The joint study of domestic violence (law) and forced eviction (activism) registers the fight for home within, but also beyond, feminist debates. For example, in Home SOS I develop scholarship on intimate war by arguing that attrition warfare is a temporal register that also deserves exploration. Connecting literatures on intimate war with those on slow violence to explore this type of warfare complicates ‘conventional assumptions about violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event‐focused, time bound, and body bound’ (Nixon 2011, p. 3). Rob Nixon distinguishes slow violence as that which ‘occurs gradually, and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’ (p. 2). If necropolitics ‘is, in its most visible form, governing through death, slow violence is both its mode of operation and its effect at the level of the everyday’ (Mayblin et al. 2019, p. 5). The crises of domestic violence and forced eviction are invested with the long‐lasting harms of slow violence that are too often ‘outside our flickering attention spans’ (Nixon 2011, p. 6).
In a move to address such occlusions, scholars have become more attuned to ‘sluggish temporalities of suffering’ that ‘dispossess without even breaching thresholds of eventfulness’ (Ahmann 2018, p. 144). Work on crisis has been traditionally understood, in contrast, as a ‘a privileged designation – a moment of rupture – that incites action and brings contradictions to light’. Domestic violence and forced eviction have ‘eventful’ moments, be this the punch of a fist or the crashing down of a bulldozer, but these are rarely singular moments as statistical data from Cambodia attests. They are more dispersed processes of dislocation that have tended to escape attention in comparison to civil and international wars (Baviskar 2009). Slow violence compels, therefore, that ‘we look beyond the immediate, the visceral, and the obvious in our explorations of social injustice’ (Davies 2019, p. 2). For example, while there may be an initial dislocation and trauma, survivors sometimes must deal with long‐term or gradual harms associated with protracted circumstances of displacement (Murrey 2016; Tanyag 2018) that can be conceptualised as slow violence (Hyndman 2019).
What the crisis ordinary, intimate war, and slow violence have in common is their insistence on the habitual and on‐going harms of everyday life. As articulated by Ben Anderson et al. (2019, p. 2), concepts such as these respond ‘to a fraying and breaking down of the geo‐historical promise and hope that the everyday or ordinary can be separated from emergency/disaster’. They show how ‘this promise and hope was only ever available to certain valued lives, came at a cost to other racialized, gendered, and