Home SOS. Katherine Brickell
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(Yuval‐Davis 1997) and neglect ‘rights, obligations, recognitions and respect around those most intimate spheres of life’ (Plummer 2001, p. 238). To counter this, the book builds on feminist geography work that has emerged in the last five years on marriage as central to notions and articulations of family and citizenship (Ansell et al. 2018; Brown 2015; D’Aoust 2018; Waitt 2015; Wemyss, Yuval‐Davis, and Cassidy 2018; Yeoh, Chee, and Vu 2014). As a result, I provide a ‘more complete geography of citizenship’ by exploring the ‘hidden spaces’ of home life and marriage (Staeheli et al. 2012, p. 641), which are too often discounted.
The spatial pivot of the book on the extra‐domestic also underscores the centrality of home as a ‘gateway right’ (Amnesty International 2012). The domestic violence and forced eviction material presented in Home SOS shows that without the right to dwell, other rights, such as living safely, are much harder to achieve. This matters, given that the home is not only a place in which people live but also ‘an idea and imaginary that is imbued with feelings’ (Blunt and Dowling 2006, p. 2). As David Madden and Peter Marcuse (2016, p. 12) write:
It [the home] is a universal necessity of life, in some ways an extension of the human body. Without it, participation in most of social, political, and economic life is impossible. Housing is more than shelter; it can provide personal safety and ontological security. While the domestic environment can be the site of oppression and justice, it also has the potential to serve as a confirmation of one’s agency, cultural identity, individuality, and creative powers.
The loss of home, be this materially and/or metaphorically, can therefore manifest as a form of ‘compound disempowerment’ (Millar 2015) that women and their families experience and try to counter through survival‐work. Anne Allison (2013) points out in her research on the insecurity of work in Japan, that precarity which begins in one arena can easily slip to others. Precarity cross‐cuts women’s lives, spirals even, and with this stretches beyond the location and duration of any original violence. It has been argued, for example, that the impacts of domestic violence on women impinges on their ‘housing, mental health, and employment as a key aspect of citizenship’ (Zufferey et al. 2016, p. 1). The United Nations (2014, p. 1) has recognised too that in forced eviction cases, severe trauma can result and ‘set back further the lives of those that are often already marginalized or vulnerable in society’ (notably women). Domestic violence and forced eviction therefore exacerbate the disadvantaged position that women often have in relation to men when it comes to citizenship, despite claims to universalism (see Lister 2003). Violences of attrition they face therefore extend to the chipping away of citizenship rights in both instances.
Home SOS thereby develops geographic scholarship that critically interrogates the concept and utilities of rights and ‘the particularities of place, the spatialities of power and difference, and the scalar interplay between universal ideals, the territoriality of the state, and the experiences of individual bodies’ (Laliberté 2015, p. 58). Its domestic tilt links with, and sheds lights on, a human rights regime that has grown internationally to encompass a variety of private threats to human dignity. The book provides insights into the historically, geographically, socially, and culturally contingent nature of rights and citizenship in Cambodia today. It therefore offers a window on to vernacularisation: ‘the extraction of ideas and practices from the universal sphere of international organizations, and their translation into terms that make sense to their local communities’ (Merry and Levitt 2017, p. 213). Set in a country where traditional norms dictate that domestic problems are not communicated beyond the spatial confines of the home, I demonstrate, in this vernacular frame, how personal and collective action has tried to reframe domestic issues as societal problems through rights‐based discourse. However, at the same time I reveal how to be Khmer, as it is exerted by government spokespersons, is to reject the modern pantheon of human rights (see Chapter 3). ‘Active citizenship’ in the sense of bringing ‘private’ rights violations into public view is considered by ruling party organs not to be in the national interest. This is despite the country being signatory to a swathe of international human rights treaties. Government resistance to ‘reform that would put liberal legal frameworks and human rights ideologies into practice’ (Morris 2017, p. 29) is a perennial issue in Cambodia. Collective order is prioritised over personal freedom, and respect for strong leadership is combined with a sustained attachment to family and conventional patterns of authority (Stivens 2006). The harmony and stability of Cambodian marriages and households – women’s affective labour in the practice and performance of the crisis ordinary – is therefore considered mandatory in the reification of the secure nation.
While in the case of domestic violence this translates into keeping ‘fire’ in the house and eschewing legally sanctioned rights, in forced eviction cases this would mean letting the destruction of homes go unchallenged. Under such circumstances, it has been recently argued that it is important to distinguish between active citizens and activist citizens, the former depicting the citizen as performing given scripts and the latter writing scripts that have an effect (Isin 2009). I would caution, however, that this bifurcated vision of citizenship as performing either given or invented scripts misrepresents the multiple and contradictory scripts which are operative in Cambodia. As I have previously written of gender scripts more specifically (Brickell 2011, p. 458), ‘although the image of the present‐day woman still carries with it many ideas about acceptable femininity, the multifaceted influences now operating in Cambodian society have created a situation in which there is no singular ascription process at work’ (see also Lilja 2017). The combined study of domestic violence and forced eviction allows for the selective instrumentalisation of different visions and intensities of rights in time and space to be brought into greater view.
In this vein, Home SOS challenges the conventional contours of what constitutes activism and brings women’s helping‐seeking in domestic violence cases into the orbit of what counts as activism. Concerning forced eviction, I concentrate on an ‘activist’ group of self‐labelled housewives who contested their displacement for over a decade through public visibility and political agitation (see Askins 2011; Horton and Kraftl 2009; Pain 2014; Chatteron and Pickerill 2010 on everyday activism). Women’s diverse forms of activism, and the violence they can consequently encounter, brings into further contention the point made by Joe Turner (2016, p. 143) that efforts to (re)politicise the analysis of citizenship ‘by bringing into focus those acts which “protest” exclusory regimes’ has simultaneously helped to ‘delineate the contingency of citizenship itself’. Both examples, of DV law and forced eviction activism, underscore the gendered contingency of citizenship and the direction of the material to come in the book on the survival‐work that women undertake.
Conclusion
In this conceptually led chapter, I have explored ideas of crisis ordinary and survival‐work, bio‐necropolitics and precarity, intimate war and slow violence, law and lawfare, and rights to dwell. It has encouraged scholastic conversations across these multiple theoretical arenas and has drawn attention to the need for crisis and the capacity to dwell to be interrogated through different theories of violence, precarity, and demise. With the exceptions of precarity and intimate war, these conceptual ideas have not originated from feminist work, but have increasingly been the subject of feminist substantiation as well as critique. Home SOS continues, and extends, this work through its focus on domestic violence and forced eviction as embodied entanglements with patriarchal and capitalist forces. Both are forms of gender‐based violence that are articulated in, but also promulgated from outside, the extra‐domestic home.
They are also everyday encounters, which for many women in Cambodia are a chronic part of ordinary life. These encounters amass through increments and take an especially acute toll on women and the intensity of survival‐work necessitated. The temporal chronicity of crisis inherent in domestic violence and forced eviction is why conceptual notions such as the crisis ordinary and slow violence hold such potential purchase in the study of gender‐based violence. Through these complementary conceptual ideas and the integrated study of domestic violence and forced eviction, the rest of the book aims to examine these intimate geographies of violence and the ever‐dynamic relationship between gender,