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While Rebecca Solnett (2009, p. 10) writes that ‘emergency is a separation from the familiar, a sudden emergence into a new atmosphere, one that often demands we rise ourselves to the occasion’, the crisis ordinarily frames domestic violence and forced evictions as long emergencies of slow violence that are unrelenting in their normative unfolding. They are domains ‘where an upsetting of living is revealed to be interwoven with everyday life after all’ (Berlant 2007, p. 761). Eminent in Cambodia, Naly Pilorge, Director of the Cambodian NGO LICADHO, discerned more than a decade ago that ‘everyone claims Cambodia has come through a period of barbarism, but the sadism is still bubbling beneath the surface. Extreme violence, greed, and disregard for the most basic rights – of giving people a place to live – are still with us daily’ (cited in Levy and Scott‐Clark 2008, np). Home SOS thereby explores the paths of Cambodian homes and lives (still) submerged in protracted circumstances of violence. These are paths that in various ways have global reach and wider relevance beyond Cambodia.

Domestic violence has been described as ‘one of the starkest collective failures of the international community’ (Action Aid 2010, p. 1). It is likely that there has been an under‐estimate, given the non‐reporting of cases, of worldwide data, which indicates that 35% of women have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non‐partner sexual violence (World Health Organization 2014a). In the last 40 years, violence against women has become visible as a major social issue and has been labelled ‘a global health problem of epidemic proportions’ (WHO 2014a). Domestic violence has also been described in the media and international health arena as a ‘hidden crisis’ worldwide (BBC 2018; WHO 2014b), thus rhetorically challenging its non‐eventful status in popular and political consciousness. The ‘hidden crisis’ of violence against women has additionally been raised within the context of other, more archetypal crisis scenarios, including academic work on the current refugee ‘crisis’ in Europe (Freedman 2016) and in the wake of natural disasters (Nguyen 2019; Parkinson and Zara 2013).

In a similar discursive vein to domestic violence as a global problem, forced eviction – when people are forced out of their homes against their will often with the threat of use of violence (Amnesty International 2012, p. 2) – has been described as a ‘global phenomenon’ and a ‘global crisis’ (UN‐HABITAT 2011b, p. viii). Forced eviction is ‘the permanent or temporary removal against their will of individuals, families and/or communities from the homes and/or land which they occupy, without the provision of, and access to, appropriate forms of legal or other protection’ (Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 1997, np). Every year, millions of people around the world are forcibly evicted from their homes and their land (United Nations 2014). Yet, despite this, for too long ‘social scientists, journalists, and policymakers all but ignored eviction, making it one of the least studied processes affecting the lives of poor families’ (Desmond 2016, pp. 265–296). Looking to rectify this trend, Matthew Desmond’s (2016) book Evicted shows that in Milwaukee, the United States, eviction from rental accommodation has become commonplace for women in its poorest black neighbourhoods; and, while ‘incarceration has come to define the lives of men from impoverished black 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 attentive to the under‐studied spatialities and temporalities of the extra‐domestic and its crisis ordinariness. The long‐term crisis‐management work of domestic violence and forced eviction is therefore replete with (further) risks of bodily depletion.

On these grounds, there is unexhausted conceptual merit in thinking through intersections between survival‐work and slow violence. Interdisciplinary feminist work also has an important role to play in advancing geographical literatures on crisis and emergency that are showing an accelerated pace of interest in slow violence (as recent examples, see Anderson et al. 2019; Brydolf‐Horwitz 2018; Rydstrom 2019; Pain 2019). These examples emphasise how ‘psychic and physical attenuation and deterioration are part of the ongoingness of ordinary life’ which ‘allows us to decouple the concept of slow emergencies from the concept of the event, or more precisely one particular mode of eventfulness associated with the sensational and the spectacular’ (Anderson et al. 2019, p. 11). Feminist perspectives can really push, probe, and propel the theorising and addressing of masculinist practices, connected drivers, and social relations of the crisis ordinary (e.g. patriarchy and capitalism) that structure these attenuations and deterioriations from a gendered perspective. The survival‐work that is the crisis ordinary represents an important conceptual route to register the social reproductive labour that sustains and, in certain circumstances, challenges the chronicity of domestic crises.