Читать книгу Home SOS - Katherine Brickell - Страница 13

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’ (Tyner 2019, p. 1307; see also Rioux 2015).

With these points in mind, a mainstay argument pursued in Home SOS is that women are not only disproportionally impacted upon by domestic violence and forced eviction as events and processes in themselves but that they are also tasked with the adjustive work of homemaking and the management of everyday precarity stemming from this. The expectation of, and necessity for, women’s survival-work in the crisis ordinary is highly problematic and the home is a key setting where this can be identified and studied. Homemaking is a cultural process and since a ‘culture only exists as a sum total of its iterations’ (Macgregor Wise 2000, p. 310), this ‘pragmatic (life‐making)’ and ‘accretive (life‐building)’ work becomes endangered and more arduous when the conditions for predictability are undermined (Berlant 2007, p. 757). My reference to survival is therefore a ‘back to basics’ move (Heynen 2006, p. 920), which recognises the centrality of home to survival and the labours that go into the meeting of basic material need, familiarity, and comfort. ‘Practices of survivability’, Loretta Lees, Annunziata, and Rivas‐Alonso (2018, p. 349) write, include ‘all of the different practices people employ to stay put’ and that counteract ‘blanket statements of neoliberal hegemony’.

The survival-work that women do to ‘stay put’ is underpinned by the home being both ‘a nodal point of concrete social relations’ and ‘a conceptual or discursive space of identification’ (Rapport and Dawson 1998, p. 17). The home as a physical and ideological entity reflects the significance of place in ‘displacement’ (Davidson 2009, p. 226, emphasis in original). As I conjectured earlier, domestic violence and forced eviction are attempted deprivations of home, its material infrastructure, and/or sense of belonging. Domestic violence is one of the most overlooked forms of displacement as women are often forced to leave their homes suddenly, without their possessions, to an unknown and unfamiliar place (Warrington 2001; Graham and Brickell 2019). In the United Kingdom, for example, tens of thousands of forced migrations occur each year as a result of domestic violence yet it is a country designated as having no internally displaced persons (Bowstead 2015, 2017). Such mobilities

‘could certainly be understood as emergency’ given that they ‘demand highly intensive forms of movement that radically transform one’s life chances and quality of life’ (Adey 2016, p. 32). Women experience ‘a process of spatial churn’ as they undertake individual, isolated journeys, and move multiple times before they are able to find a settled home (Bowstead 2015, p. 317). For women who cannot leave meanwhile, they may feel ‘homeless at home’ (Wardhaugh 1999), living in, and managing, a violent environment through daily and multiple forms of survival-work. The ideological scripting of home as intimate and safe can also lead to women tolerating violence so as not to signal a deep failure or collapse of home (Price 2002). The book shows that in Cambodia, this ideological scripting is strongly focused on women’s familial responsibilities and has a similar influence. Part of what makes the violence so untenable and cruel is the survival-work required to keep up this pretence.

The threat of forced eviction can also lead to the chipping away of home, materially and metaphorically, and the eventual displacement and dislocation of families ejected from their homes leads to their ‘re‐settlement’/homelessness. Much like the ‘spatial churn’ that domestic violence survivors can face, forced eviction also produces a harmful turbulence that women must typically counteract through their emotional and physical labours. Survival-work inside, and outside of, the home is therefore an important, yet still neglected, part of labour and economic geography that warrants scholarly development (Strauss 2018).