Home SOS. Katherine Brickell
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processes, including Cambodia’s recent history of humanitarian crisis at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. A second area that Home SOS builds from is the vital importance of ‘non‐eventful geographies’ of violence and everyday life – violences that are too often left out of social science work on suffering and dying (Wilkinson and Ortega‐Alcázar 2019). Such ‘quasi‐events’, Elizabeth Povinelli (2011, p. 13) argues, ‘never quite achieve the status of having occurred or taken place’. My ambition, then, is to reposition domestic violence and forced eviction as events, rather than quasi‐events, that happen, and are happening, in the extra‐domestic realm.
Domestic life for many women in Cambodia, I show, is saturated with crises, which are viewed in ordinary and anticipatory terms. The Cambodian Buddhist expression ‘fire in the house’ embodies the idea, for example, that in order to maintain a harmonious household, women are responsible for suppressing three fires of potential conflict within the home – parents, husbands, and ‘others’ (Derks 2008). Often uttered in relation to domestic violence, the Khmer proverb ‘Plates in a Basket will Rattle’ speaks to the saturation and management of conflict (fire) in everyday life that is normal rather than diversionary. Crisis in this guise can be approached as a ‘prosaic’, ‘the routinization of a register of improvisations lived as such by people and, in this sense, belonging at most to the domain of the obvious or self‐evident, and at least to the banal or that which no longer evokes surprise’ (Mbembé and Roitman 1995, p. 326). The first‐ever survey of domestic violence in Cambodia opens with a vignette that evokes this further: ‘if people live in the same house there will inevitably be some collisions. It’s normal … it can’t be helped. But, from time to time, plates break. So do women’ (Zimmerman 1995, np). Through the life stories of female respondents, Home SOS focuses on these collisions and, in some tragic cases, their fatalities; my argument is that women’s homes and bodies are being broken, time and again, in the making of Cambodia today.
The joint study of domestic violence and forced eviction reveals how this pernicious breaking exceeds baseline expectations of domestic conflict. Not only this, but the home is a dynamic space of potentiality (Povinelli 2011) in which women are innovating under these debilitating circumstances in different ways. Some women I spent time with continued to manage the flames, others felt compelled to ignite them in the public sphere to try and extinguish their threat, whilst others exited marriage to escape the heat altogether. In the ordinary, then, it is possible to read the eventful, the memorable, and also the episodic, ‘occasions that make experiences while not changing much of anything’ (Berlant 2007, p. 760). As Susan Fraiman (2017, p. 123) writes in relation to the reproduction of the ordinary, it is women who ‘generally get the brunt’ of this work. Women’s firefighting takes many forms in contemporary Cambodia and the book ignites discussion of domestic violence and forced eviction as fires with multiple and politically imbued sources, responses, and outcomes.
Home SOS goes on to show, for instance, how the mundanity of the crisis ordinary continues as marginalisation and containment of these supposed ‘non‐events’ to the home by a government unwilling to tolerate its spilling out into public and the concomitant political questions and challenges to its power that this may bring. Government attempts to keep disruption to the established order at a minimum enables the continued production of death, social or actual, through de facto gerrymandering whereby political advantage is achieved by manipulating and regulating the boundaries of home and the ‘fire’ within. Women have the right to dwell free from violence, but in their everyday lives, and in their pursuit of this goal, are subject to a bio‐necropolitical brutality that the book brings into view through its joint focus on domestic violence and forced eviction.
The Survival-Work of Domestic Violence and Forced Eviction
To examine women’s injuries, but also the survival practices, that are performed in the domestic domain, I synergistically place domestic violence and forced eviction within an expansive conceptualisation of work that exposes capitalist patriarchy as the requirement that women perform survival-work across private and public realms (Dalla Costa 1972; Mies 1982). The centrality of social reproduction to accounts of violence and dispossession thus take on critical importance (Fernandez 2018). As Maria Mies (2014, p. 2) elaborates in relation to the accumulation of wealth, productive capital, and control by men:
Today, it is more than evident that the accumulation process itself destroys the core of the human essence everywhere, because it is based on the destruction of women’s autarky over their lives and bodies.
As feminist writing has long set out, women’s labour in the home is not a separate social sphere located outside of economic relations but is integral to it. Despite this, ‘housework is not counted as work, and is still not considered by many as “real work”’ (Federici 2012, p. 127). My reference to survival work therefore tries not to lose sight of the range of labour that women undertake in the extra‐domestic home, but which remains largely invisible in writings on political and economic change in Cambodia. The home is a discursive construct and product of ongoing and demanding labour that is intimately connected, rather than sealed off, from political meaning and impact. Just as Sylvia Chant (2007) identifies a ‘feminisation of responsibility and obligation’ taking hold in the Global South as rising numbers of poor women of all ages are working outside the home and are continuing to perform the bulk of unpaid reproductive tasks, Home SOS adds the precarities of domestic violence and forced eviction to this growing suite of duties. As such, it directly responds to Berlant’s (2007, p. 757) incitement that ‘we need better ways to talk about activity oriented toward the reproduction of ordinary life: the burdens of compelled will that exhaust people taken up by managing contemporary labor and household pressures’.
Evidence from around the world demonstrates that it is women who, with deepening inequalities, are shouldering the burden of adjustment as ‘shock absorbers’ and carers for households on the edge of survival (Brickell and Chant 2010; Cappellini, Marilli, and Parsons 2014; Elson 2002; Gill and Orgad 2018; McDowell 2016; Sou and Webber 2019). Given the corporeal and material hardships of domestic violence and forced eviction, as well as the dramatically limited and high‐stake choices that they both entail, the significance of emotional (Hochschild 1983) as well as physical labour cannot be discounted. Focusing on daily spaces and routine situations reveals how ‘precarity is embedded in the mundane tasks of the domestic, and as a result, unevenly impacts women whose traditional roles as mothers and caretakers mean that they are often at the fore of place‐making practices and responsibilities’ (Muñoz 2018, p. 411). Both domestic violence and forced eviction are traumatic ruptures in time and space of domestic and social reproduction in all their dimensions. This includes the symbolic dimensions of identity and representation (Meertens and Segura‐Escobar 1996) that Cambodian women are typically responsible for in their familial lives.
If patriarchy is to be understood as men’s violent appropriation of women’s labour as a dominant force of production (Federici 2014, p. x), then the survival-work that women perform is being co‐opted as a means to uphold the viability of the Cambodian state. This is because ‘the reproduction of human beings is the foundation of every economic and political system’ and ‘the immense amount of paid and unpaid domestic work done by women in the home is what keeps the world moving’ (Federici 2012, p. 2). In other words, the Cambodian government’s accumulation model is being strengthened not only through the waged labour of women in the garment factories sustaining its economic growth but also the unwaged labour that women are undertaking in the home. Both are ‘productive’ for the reproduction of ‘big men’ and the modern Cambodian state; predicated on the control of women’s homes and bodies that they desire to have firm and lasting dominance over. The home and women’s labour in it, are cornerstones upon which capital accumulation is forged. Cindi Katz (2001, p. 709) writes that, as a result, it is important to critically study ‘the material social practices through which people reproduce themselves on a daily and generational basis and through which the social relations and material bases of capitalism are renewed’ (see also Federici 2018a). The survival-work entailed in living with, or on, domestic violence and forced eviction pushes the importance, therefore, of ‘broadening the concept of labor to more fully articulate the dialectics of production and reproduction’