Home SOS. Katherine Brickell
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The twin study of domestic violence and forced eviction demands not only that these conceptualisations of everyday brutality are linked but that their gendered politics and outcomes are scrutinized in greater depth.
Law and Lawfare
Home SOS demonstrates how in the study of crisis ordinariness, bio‐necropolitics and precarity, intimate war and slow violence, law is a significant ‘splice’ (Blomley 2003) in the story. Law seeps in and out of the home influencing power relations within and beyond it. It is part of the ‘scenic tableau of bodily existence’ in the crisis ordinary (Berlant 2014, p. 27). As Jeannie Suk (2009, p. 3) elaborates in At Home in the Law:
In areas of utmost importance to individuals’ relations to the state and to each other home is often overlooked as though it was self‐evident and contained axioms from which legal results follow. But the legal meanings of home are ambivalent and contested. The home is a site of struggle over the most basic concepts that frame and construct our evolving legal universe.
Related to this point, a recent critical legal studies scholarship has made an effort to move away from a legal analysis of property rights to focus on the human consequences of law related to the home (Fox O’Mahony and Sweeney 2016). While in legal geographic scholarship the home has been framed as a setting ‘through which the ins and outs of a variety of power relations are established, enacted, revised, and reproduced’ (Delaney 2010, p. 77), associated work has its limitations too, including a restrictive and disembodied onus on property rights. Emphasising how law is deeply implicated in multiple experiences of home, new socio‐legal writing underscores the significance of law in both forging and mitigating precarity in the domestic domain (Carr, Edgeworth, and Hunter 2018). It suggests an important direction of travel in newer work that is attentive to lived experiences of the legally contingent nature of security afforded by home.
Appraising the legal geographies project, as it is known, also brings about similar critiques and directions of travel. The project, emerging in the 1980s onwards, has lacked appreciation of the law’s gendered manifestations and reverberations (Brickell and Cuomo 2019; Cuomo and Brickell 2019). Home SOS therefore contributes to forwarding feminist legal geography and understanding of how different types of laws, be these international, national, and/or customary, have the power to wage, as well as relieve, intimate war in women’s lives. Socio‐legal life, in this regard, ‘is constituted by different legal spaces operating simultaneously on different scales and from different interpretive standpoints’ (de Sousa Santos 1987, p. 288; see also Valverde 2015). The book thus explores the differential experiences of women living in pluri‐legal fields of life and death and builds on law as a key medium by which feminist scholars have explored how subjects are produced. Linking to Michel Foucault’s work, Judith Butler (1989, p. 601) contends that the ‘body is a site where regimes of discourse and power inscribe themselves, a nodal point or nexus for relations of juridical and productive power’. Questioning the pregiven, in some senses there, body, she asks ‘What shape does this body have, and how is it to be known?’ How different bodies are produced in and through law is a key realm for exploring these provocations as part of bio‐necropolitical power play on display in Cambodia. As Butler (1990, pp. 134–135) recognises, ‘Law is not literally internalized, but incorporated, with the consequences that bodies are produced which signify that law on and through the body’. This is especially prescient given that law ‘sits albeit sometimes unrecognizably, between the call for justice and the imperatives of violence ordering of the societies in which we live’ (Sarat 2001, p. 13). For these reasons, juridical and cultural articulations of law and legality have a powerful influence in excluding, marginalising, and disciplining certain bodies (Brickell and Cuomo 2019).
Interest in the ‘deadly embrace’ of law and violence has brought attention to the associated concept of lawfare (Gregory 2007, p. 211; see also Doshi and Ranganathan 2019; Jones 2016; Jones and Smith 2015; Kittrie 2016; Springer 2013a). The Lawfare Blog3 links the popularisation of the term with the US military figure Charles Dunlap (2001, np) who saw ‘law as a weapon of war’ and ‘disturbing evidence that the rule of law is being hijacked into just another way of fighting (lawfare), to the detriment of humanitarian values as well as the law itself’. While ‘rule of law’ is generally understood as a value to be respected and a mechanism via which to guarantee justice and human rights to citizens, ‘rule by law’ – personified through the misuse conception of lawfare – is a distortion more easily conceived of as an instrument of oppression (Brickell 2016). Although it has been argued that ‘rule of law and rule by law occupy a single continuum and do not present mutually exclusive options’ (Holmes 2003, p. 49), the distinction remains nonetheless instructive. Furthermore, despite some additional kickback from military studies about the ‘random’ use and application of lawfare in certain disciplines, including geography (Voetelink 2017), it is a meaningful catalyst for bringing to the fore the political operation of law in the intimate wars that women are facing in their daily lives, but that continue to be side‐lined. The domestic violence and forced eviction case studies therefore work, in tandem, to interrogate ‘how law shapes, and takes shape through, multiple power‐laden systems of domination that govern the lives of differently positioned women and bodies’ (Gorman 2019, p. 1054).
Rights to Dwell
As Chapter 1 set out, domestic violence and forced eviction can be thought of as forms of displacement. Removal from home against the will of individuals, families, and communities is a gross violation of human rights, in particular the right to adequate housing (United Nations Commission on Human Rights 1993, p. 227). As the UN Special Rapporteur on Housing notes, ‘The right to life cannot be separated from the right to a secure place to live, and the right to a secure place to live only has meaning in the context of a right to live in dignity and security, free of violence’ (United Nations General Assembly 2016a, p. 11). Both domestic violence and forced eviction transgress and make imperative, therefore, the ‘right to dwell’ (Davidson 2009, p. 232). The right to dwell emphasises ‘a right to inhabit the abstract space comprising “home” in a wider sense’ than just its physical infrastructure (Hubbard and Lees 2018, p. 18; Baeten and Listerborn 2015). This spirit is echoed in the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1991), which states that:
The right to housing should not be interpreted in a narrow or restrictive sense which equates it with, for example, the shelter provided by merely having a roof over one’s head or views shelter exclusively as a commodity. Rather it should be seen as the right to live somewhere in security, peace and dignity.
Home SOS studies, accordingly, how domestic violence and forced eviction compromise one or both conceptual parameters of home as a physical location in which people reside and as an imaginative space of emotion and belonging (Al‐Ali and Koser 2002; Blunt and Varley 2004; Blunt and Dowling 2006; Rapport and Dawson 1998). The book thereby concentrates on what happens when this occurs and how their reclamation is orchestrated and pushed back. It picks up, on this basis, from Louise Waite’s (2009, p. 412) socio‐political framing of precarity as ‘both a condition and a point of mobilisation in response to that condition’. Therefore, while the crisis ordinary is felt and lived through the domestic sphere, its loss can also bring some hope in its creation of an ‘impasse’ (Berlant 2011, p. 5), a cavity in which possible capacity and outcome can grow ‘to make a person or a people available for the next (potentially transformative, if maddening encounter)’ (Berlant 2014, p. 32). The home in this guise represents a ‘space to recalibrate, adjust, and coordinate feasible ways of moving forward’ (Harris, Nowicki, and Brickell 2018, p. 156). In Home SOS, I critically assess domestic violence law (DV law) and forced eviction activism as two avenues for potentially building new ‘infrastructures for reproducing life’ free from violence in the home (Berlant 2011, p. 5). I also explore women’s survival strategies as they sit variously alongside, outside, or in rejection of these interventions. The book therefore intervenes in debates connected to the scope and limits of citizenship, rights, and agency in the context of rights to dwell.
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