Home SOS. Katherine Brickell
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is traditionally headed by a man who is invested with meeting its economic and social needs, and women its housekeeping and child rearing responsibilities (Ministry of Womens’ Affairs (MOWA) 2015, p. 23). It is normatively accepted that Cambodian wives must provide ‘shade’ including ‘shelter, safety and prosperity’ for their children (Kent 2011a, p. 197–198) and are responsible for the management of conflict in family life. Women in Cambodia have primary duty for the social reproduction of their households and, in turn, they gain important public value through domesticity. Nineteenth century normative Cambodian poems such as the Chbab Srei (Rules for Women) refer derogatorily to women who walk too loudly in the house as to make it tremble, and should a woman act too forcefully, neglect her household responsibilities, or not fulfil the entirety of her husband’s demands, then blame can be assigned to her for the breakdown of their marriage. Divorced women are typically regarded as socially incomplete in Cambodian society (Ovesen, Trankell, and Öjendal 1996) and a Khmer proverb reminds daughters that, ‘you should be married before you are called an old maid’ (cited in Heuveline and Poch 2006, p. 102). Women’s homes and bodies therefore risk being considered as lacking when marriages fail. To avoid this, women in Cambodia are invested with the demands of ensuring the harmony, intimacy, and warmth of their marriages and wider family in the home. Domestic violence and forced eviction not only challenge women’s capacity to fulfil these expectations, but they also threaten the material and symbolic foundations of everyday life from which life is grown and sustained. Both domestic violence and forced eviction have, therefore, a disproportionate impact upon women given the intensities of homemaking in comparison to men.
The twin focus of Home SOS on domestic violence and forced eviction arises, in part too, from their status as human rights abuses, which witness the ‘mutual absorption of violence and the ordinary’ (Das 2007, p. 7). The home is, perhaps, the most ordinary of spaces on which geographers train their research and analysis. An intimacy sustaining vision of the ‘ordinary’ home, however, is complicated by domestic violence and forced eviction. which both disrupt the safety, stability, and comfort that the space should normatively afford. As Lauren Berlant (1998, p. 281) argues,
intimacy … involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way. Usually, this story is set within zones of familiarity and comfort: friendship, the couple, and the family form, animated by expressive and emancipating kinds of love … This view of ‘a life’ that unfolds intact within the intimate sphere represses, of course, another fact about it: the unavoidable troubles, the distractions and disruptions that make things turn out in unpredicted scenarios.
Berlant’s conception of intimacy brings to the fore the ‘unpredicted scenarios’, which are perceptible and woven into the ordinary. Under this guise, the ‘ordinary’ cannot be equated with the benign and harmless (Mayblin, Wake, and Kazemi 2019); its study requires that scholars go beyond and interrogate the taken‐for‐granted. The potential for such discordance, ambiguity, and negativity in experiences of ordinary life has been a motivating focus in the critical geographies of the home sub‐field, which emerged in the mid‐2000s (Blunt and Varley 2004; Blunt and Dowling 2006). As Jeanne Moore (2000, p. 213) argued, there was a ‘need to focus on the ways in which home disappoints, aggravates, neglects, confines and contradicts as much as it inspires and comforts’. Decades on, there is room to think more about how to theorise the home as a space that absorbs as well as repels ‘trouble’. The fact that in the family geographies sub‐field ‘everyday processes of family conflict, trouble and disruption’ currently only ‘occupy a marginal space in the geographic literature’ (Tarrant and Hall 2019, p.4) lends further weight to this task.
In Home SOS, I take the ‘crisis ordinary’ (Berlant 2011) as the lead conceptual frame through which I deepen theoretical engagements on intimate geographies of violence in these sub‐fields, and geography more broadly. Domestic violence and forced eviction, I contend, are both instantiations of the crisis ordinary, ‘when the ordinary becomes a landfill for overwhelming and impending crises of life‐building and expectation whose sheer volume so threatens what it has meant to ‘have a life’ that adjustment seems like an accomplishment’ (Berlant 2011, p. 3). Home SOS explores this social theory through a grounded, embodied, and long‐running account of crisis ordinaries that are unfolding in Cambodia and that allow elite men, in particular, to maintain the balance of power at the expense of women and their homes.
The book that follows is an ambitious, expressly experimental one, which rather being a single‐issue monograph is dedicated to the integrated study of domestic violence and forced eviction. Domestic violence and forced eviction are typically understood as discrete and unconnected violences, the former usually discussed as a type of interpersonal violence and the latter as a ‘violence of property’ (Springer 2013a, p. 608). However, a core argument made in the book is that the intimate injustices and precarious journeys that domestic violence and forced eviction embody are also intimately linked and, in some instances, simultaneously faced in women’s lives. I read and weave these interconnections through hybrid yet complementary theoretical engagements with the crisis ordinary and survival-work, bio‐necropolitics and precarity, intimate war and slow violence, law and lawfare, and rights to dwell (see Chapter 2). Drawing on literatures from development studies, women’s studies, anthropology, politics, and international relations (IR), and spanning development, legal, political, and social geography, I provide, ultimately, an original book‐length study that combines domestic violence and forced eviction to offer relational insights between these violences.
In this introductory chapter I set up some of the major and interconnected arguments that the book takes forward: first, that domestic life is lived and manifest in and through crisis ordinaries; second, that domestic violence and forced eviction necessitate what I call ‘survival-work’; and, third, that they are both forms of gender‐based violence. I then turn to the research trajectories that led to the convergence of the domestic violence and forced eviction research and material. I also include reflection on key overarching methodological approaches taken and how these are reflected in the content and ethos of Home SOS. Finally, I move on to the structure of the book and summarise its findings.
Crisis Ordinaries of Domestic Violence and Forced Eviction
If Berlant’s work on the crisis ordinary reminds scholars ‘to make sense of the ways in which subjects find themselves habituating, situating, desiring, or feeling in the world, day to day, often amid conditions of cruelty’ (Cram 2014, p. 374), then Home SOS shows how systemic crises are entrenched in the home and speak to broader patterns of violences as part and parcel of the vernacular landscape of Cambodia. Both domestic violence and forced eviction can be considered as spatial exclusions or ‘expulsions’ (Sassen 2014) from home and living space as part of a wider diagnosis of unstable and disconcerting times. Yet they are forms of ongoing loss that a language of expulsion risks eliding. Taken together, domestic violence and forced eviction work to underscore the significance of ‘less sensational, yet nevertheless devastating’ dislocations from home (Vaz‐Jones 2018, p. 711). They are singular yet inter‐linked forms of crisis ordinariness rooted in metaphorical and/or physical displacement. Above all, however, they are lived experiences, which the book prioritises. Just as domestic violence can lead to forced eviction from home, empirical data in the book attests to the emergent links that can be drawn between forced eviction, domestic violence, and marital breakdown. In order to start building a holistic understanding of intimate violences encountered by women in contemporary Cambodian society, the equivalences and morphisms that exist between domestic violence and forced eviction are explored in the pages that follow.
Doing so aims to counteract how ‘there are many forms of precarity and disorder not captured under the designation of “crisis” that do not command the same critical attention’ as high profile disasters (Ahmann 2018, p. 147). In this regard, the book thus builds from recently published work in two areas. The first relates to crisis geographies that are multi‐scalar and embedded in political economy dynamics (such as austerity), but are experienced intensely at the personal scale and articulated through everyday fragilities of