Home SOS. Katherine Brickell
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neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor men were locked up. Poor women were locked out’ (p. 98). Although the young and the old, the sick and the able‐bodied, are not unaffected by eviction, he contends that for the women in his ethnographic research, eviction had become ‘ordinary’. ‘Walk into just about any urban housing court in America’, Desmond observes, ‘and you can see them waiting on benches for their case to be called’ (p. 299).
Research on domestic violence and forced eviction reveals the structural conditions and power geometries that render these violences chronic features of women’s everyday experiences across the globe. These all‐too‐familiar violences can be considered ‘as’ crises, and reflect home life ‘in’ crisis (see Roitman 2013, p. 2 on distinctions of crisis). Yet domestic violence and forced eviction are not exceptional events; rather, they are emblematic of pervasive precarities and displacements lived in and through the domestic sphere. On balance, they do not attract ‘feverish crisis pronouncements’ or reach the heights of ‘clamorous crisis’ like other more visible and visibilised crises (Roitman 2013, p. 6). Instead, they are propelled by ‘longitudinal forces of upheaval’ (Ramsay 2019a, p. 4), which calls upon women’s survival‐work in a grueling intimate war mired in patriarchal and violence social, economic, and political relations. Their scale and scope, their diffusion of trauma into domestic life, have become ‘increasingly normal and perpetual instead of functioning as localized disruptions to the ordinary’ (Calvente and Smicker 2017, p. 3). As Ayona Datta (2016a, p. 329) writes in relation to Delhi slums, ‘violence is constructed not as an interruption of intimacy but rather as a route through which intimate relationships are upheld, sustained and rendered ordinary’.
In a connected sense, Home SOS positions domestic violence and forced eviction as forms of structural violence because they are embedded in a political economy of inequality and violence that causes injury and unnecessary death. Johan Galtung (1996, p. iii) describes structural violence as ‘the violence frozen into structures, and the culture that legitimizes violence’.1 This freezing is formative of the crisis ordinary but is not summative of it. The remit of the crisis ordinary is not limited to structural violence as a normalised condition. Rather it encompasses the management and endurance of rupture in everyday practices and performances of domesticity. It is here that an enlivened and embodied sense of structural violence emerges. As Achille Mbembé and Janet Roitman (1995, p. 325) write,
… it is in everyday life that the crisis as a limitless experience and a field of the dramatization of particular forms of subjectivity is authored, receives its translations, is institutionalized, loses its exceptional character and in the end, as a ‘normal,’ ordinary and banal phenomenon, becomes an imperative to consciousness.
While a swathe of recent publications on crisis point to the significance of ‘intimate uncertainties’ in reproduction (Strasser and Piart 2018, p. v), the crisis ordinary underscores, in contrast, the predictability and embeddedness of these uncertainties. As Berlant (2007, p. 760, emphasis in original) notes, when scholars and activists refer to ‘long‐term conditions of privation, they choose to misrepresent the duration and scale of the situation by calling a crisis that is a fact of life and has been a defining fact of life for a given population that lives in that crisis in ordinary time’. Crisis, in this vein, has ‘come to be construed as a protracted historical and experiential condition’, an ‘enduring crisis’ that questions its designation as a ‘critical, decisive momenty’ (Roitman 2013, p. 2). That crisis ‘has become part of the infrastructure of the ordinary’ (De Abreu 2018, p. 747) runs the risk, however, of being normalised rather than questioned within an ontological condition of uncertainty. Roitman (2013, pp. 95–96) is right to query that ‘If history amounts to a record of interruptions (suffering, alienation, crisis) how does one successfully resist or avoid the temptation to achieve admission into the record, thus severing recognition and noteworthiness from the achievement of politics?’ The crisis ordinary, however, is both a marker of crisis and of the ordinary; it encourages scholars to connect and contest subterranean structures of violence with those lived closer to the surface in the extra-domestic home. The survival-work populating the pages of Home SOS responds not only to crisis in the ordinary, but also actively extends it to think more about the crisis of the ordinary and its contested reproduction.
Home SOS focuses accordingly on how women get by with, pragmatically adjust to, and/or confront violence in different times and spaces and using different practices and consciousness of survival. Although ‘under a regime of crisis ordinariness, life feels truncated – more like doggy paddling than swimming out into a magnificent horizon’ (Berlant 2007, p. 779), the book takes a more variegated approach to agency than this analogy perhaps communicates. A fuller understanding of women’s survival‐work mobilises distinctions between resilience, reworking, and resistance (Katz 2001). Katz’s (2001) contextualized accounts of agency differentiate between ‘resistance’ (oppositional consciousness that achieves transformative change), ‘reworking’ (that alters the organisation but not the polarisation of power relations), and ‘resilience’ (that allows people to survive but with limited change in circumstances) (see also Chapter 5). Although Berlant’s notion of doggy paddling evokes a sense of resilience above all else, what the crisis ordinary does, for me at least, is to mark out and critically, call out, the diversity of survival‐work, be this resilience, reworking, and/or resistance, as a crisis in itself.
As such, the crisis ordinary sidesteps the resounding attraction that resilience discourse, in particular, seems to hold for many governments, policymakers, and practitioners. Resilience is ‘tightly bound to the adage that we now live in a “time of crisis”’ and has come to ‘stand for the ability to absorb, withstand, persist and even thrive and reorganize in the face of the shocks and disturbances of always uncertain becoming’ (Simon and Randalls 2016, pp. 3–4). The zeitgeist of resilience risks normalising the status quo, however, and having a depoliticising effect by retaining and potentially deepening long‐noted expectations on women to behave as resilient subjects consolidating the function and structure of capitalist patriarchy. That women from the Global South are constructed as resilient subjects in policymaking who can manage the responsibility of bringing home money and providing care and services for family members is also widely noted and pertinent here (see, for example, Erman and Hatiboğlu 2017). For example, in the context of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, which left a devasting wake in 2013, Maria Tanyag (2018) argues that disaster resilience measures have further divested responsibility for disaster response from the state to the household and community levels. In so doing, she argues that the assumed elasticity of women’s unpaid labour and the propensity for self‐sacrificing behaviour ‘has served to reinforce the structural roots of gendered vulnerability’ (Tanyag 2018, p. 566). Tanyag explores this vulnerability through mobilising the concept of Shirin Rai, Hoskyns, and Thomas (2014, pp. 88–89) of ‘depletion for social reproduction’, when ‘resource outflows exceed resource inflows in carrying out social reproductive work over a threshold of sustainability, making it harmful for those engaged in this undervalued work’. This depletion ‘is core to what is understood as a crisis of social reproduction, that is, the inability of people to adequately reproduce their livelihoods’ (Dowling 2016, p. 455) and homes.
Whilst emerging feminist work on depletion (Gunawardana 2016; Dowling 2016; Fernandez 2018; Rai et al. 2014; Tanyag 2018) does not reference Berlant’s thinking in its theoretical articulation, there are complementarities that can be productively made with her work on the crisis ordinary. Writing on ‘slow death’, for example, Berlant (2007, p. 734) contends that the physical wearing out of a population takes place ‘when that experience is simultaneously at an extreme and in a zone of ordinariness, where life building and the attrition of human life are indistinguishable’. Women’s disproportionate burden for mitigating violence and crisis has, therefore, a likely depletive effect. The very undertaking of the physical and emotional survival‐work necessary in circumstances of domestic violence and forced eviction, becomes normalised in their home making and life building efforts. Revealing the gendered geographies of death and the survival‐work of living on are therefore rendered more possible by being