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If the crisis ordinary and survival‐work draws closer attention to women’s experiences of home life, then bio‐necropolitics and precarity bring governmentality into ever greater view. Domestic violence and forced eviction are neglected yet essential parts of debate on bio‐necropolitics. While ‘biopolitical powers work to manage, order and foster life for citizens worthy of protection, such powers work in tandem with necropolitical powers that produce death for those destined to abandonment, violence and neglect’ (Lamble 2013, p. 242). Taking on board recognition of biopower and necropolitics as ‘two sides of the same coin’ in which ‘the explosion of discursive interest in the politics of life itself, in other words, affects also the geo‐political dimension of death and killing’ (Braidotti 2013, p. 9), the book facilitates discussion on women’s experiences of home lived at the edges of life and death. It draws on, and encourages, feminist thinking on the home and female body as a privileged target for the power‐techniques and power‐relations of male‐centred systems of exploitation (Federici 2004).

In his seminal post‐colonial writing, Achille Mbembé (2003, p. 40) outlines the parameters of necropolitics and anchors it to ‘the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death‐worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (emphasis in original; see also Mbembé 2019).² According to Thom Davies, Isakjee, and Dhesi (2017, pp. 5–6), necropolitics arose as a ‘reaction to the inadequacy of biopower to conceptualize the more extreme cases of body regulation, when life was not so much being governed, as much as death itself was being sanctioned’. For Michel Foucault (1997), biopolitics was foregrounded on the social body as an object of power whose life is secured, managed, regulated, and intervened in, through regimes of authority. Matters of biopolitics, therefore, intimately relate to care, marriage, and family in which human life exists inside, rather than outside, political processes. Foucault’s theoretical propositions, however, have been criticised for being too rooted in discursive practice rather than social and economic relations that identify the source and motivations of power techniques to administer and promote life (Federici 2004). Foucault also had little to say about the politics of letting die, ‘why governing authorities would elect not to intervene when they could, or select one subset of the population for life enhancement while abandoning another’ (Li 2010, p. 66). Mbembé (2003) emphasises, therefore, the importance of looking at the ‘work of death’ so its threat is better heeded as a prevailing technique of governance.

The stories of domestic violence and forced eviction told in Home SOS include both literal physical death and also social death, as well as trade‐offs made between them by women and other actors. That domestic violence and forced eviction warrant placing in this life‐threatening register is reflected in statements by the United Nations:

In the most extreme cases, violence against women can lead to death. Two thirds of victims of intimate partner/family related homicides are women

(United Nations 2015, np).

In addition to being a violation of the prohibition on arbitrary or unlawful interference with the home, forced evictions all too often result in other severe human rights violations, particularly when they are accompanied by forced relocation or homelessness. For instance, if no adequate alternative housing is provided, victims of forced evictions are put in life‐ and health‐threatening situations

(United Nations 2014, p. 1).

Embracing a feminist geopolitical perspective which remedies how ‘state and statecraft are treated as abstract forces that float above the contingencies of everyday lives and spaces’ (Coleman 2009, p. 904), I bring the home into greater bio‐necropolitical contention by considering women’s killable homes and bodies. That the home is the most likely place globally for a woman to be killed (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) 2018) renders this task especially prescient. While ‘life and the home are so intertwined that it is almost impossible to think about one without the other’ (Desmond 2016, p. 300), death also has an intimate embrace that requires belated exploration. Scholarship on domicide, ‘the deliberate destruction of home against the will of the home dweller’, is a rare exception in its direct focus on the ‘murder of home’ (Porteous and Smith 2001, p. 3). The destruction of home, Porteous and Smith argue, causes ‘loss of historical connection; a weakening of roots; and partial erasure of the sources of memory, dreams, nostalgia and ideals’ (p. 63). Uncomfortable with the finality of homes unmade in their book, and its lack of nuanced analysis on the impacts of home loss, I pursue a more processual, agentic, and gender‐differentiated course (see also Nowicki 2014 for a critique).

In the interplay captured between life and death, Home SOS shows the variable disposability attached to Cambodian women and their homes by a government apparatus that places onus on marriages staying together in situations of domestic violence, and those that are ‘just’ collateral damage in the case of forced eviction. The former is deemed more biopolitically worthy, grievable, and less disposable than the latter, which are surplus to, and obstructive of, capitalist accumulation. Yet despite these differences between the management of domestic violence and forced eviction, both require women to take on the burden of ‘upholding the work of death’ (Mbembé 2003, p. 13) by (further) risking bodily integrity to ensure the security of others, be this a spouse, children, community, and/or the nation. Chapter 1 introduced, for example, how the enhancement and protection of Cambodian government interests and priorities are predicated on the sequestering of others, but particularly women’s homes and bodies. Together, domestic violence and forced eviction demonstrate the (attempted) appropriation of bodies and homes that are variously constituted as surplus and intrinsic to accumulation. Only through the analytical collision of domestic violence and forced eviction is it possible to produce a nuanced account of women’s homes, marriages, and bodies subjected to the differentiated manoeuvres of, and grievable statuses given by, governmental actors.

Withstanding the ‘fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life’ (Katz 2001, p. 711) being the constituent matter of the book, I provide pointed insights into the instrumentalisation of the home by the Cambodian government in order to push women to conform and submit to patriarchal and bio‐necropolitical power. Government expression of sovereignty resides, in this remit, in the fantasy, capacity, and power to dictate who lives and who dies. Protracted situations and impacts of domestic violence and forced eviction can work to keep women in a permanent state of injury stuck in, or dislodged from, the home. The crisis ordinary becomes, in this context, a compensatory practice and status vacillating in between the home as a locus of life and death.

That domestic violence and forced eviction are shown in the book to be fundamentally connected to a women’s relationship to the nation‐state and their killable status functions as an important corrective to what Melissa Wright (2011, p. 726) critiques as ‘the gaps in universalist depictions of the necropolitical and biopolitical forces at play in politics, economics, and culture’. From Wright’s (2011) writing femicide, to broader inter‐disciplinary scholarship on honour killings (Ahmetbeyzade 2008), microfinance suicide (Roy 2012), women in war (Tyner and Henkin 2015), asylum claim‐making (McKinnon 2016), and trans‐sterilisation (Repo 2019), there exists a modest yet growing body of literature that problematises the neglect of gender (and sexuality) in discussions of necropolitics and the shortening of life (see also Alves 2014).

By engaging with precarity, a condition that ‘is coming to be expected and/or accepted in a contemporary world defined by “crisis ordinary”’ (Harris and Nowicki 2018, p. 389), I further explore how people are differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death. Precarity, Judith Butler (2009, p. 25) explains, is politically induced and designates that ‘certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support’ and brings to the fore women’s disproportionate acquaintance with harm. Although precarity has traditionally been considered in terms of formal workplace dynamics and neoliberal restructuring, my research data calls for a more expansive critical geography of precarity that more closely sutures matters of social reproduction, or ‘life’s work’ (Strauss and Meehan 2015, p. 2, emphasis in original); that is: biological reproduction; unpaid production of goods and services in the home; social provisioning through voluntary work directed at meeting community needs; the reproduction of culture and ideology; and the provision of sexual, emotional, and affective services to maintain family and intimate relationships (Hoskyns and Rai 2007).

When it comes to mobilising the concept of precarity in this social reproductive context, Nancy Ettlinger’s (2007, pp. 319 and 324) approach is sympathetic to my own in going beyond precarity as a bounded historical condition. She argues that ‘beyond effects of specific global events and macro structures, precarity inhabits the microspaces of everyday life’ and although no one escapes it ‘one might argue that some people who experience more constraints than others also experience more dimensions of precarity’. Investigating the feminised responsibility for the home and its precarity as a form of gender‐based violence, I push feminist studies forward by addressing a noted gap in literature on the household and social reproduction, and their political economy dynamics in relation to violence (Rai and Elias 2015). Cambodian women, I argue, are framed as naturally endowed with the capacity to manage all that is thrown (sometimes quite literally) at them, and that this is part of the ordinary crisis that women encounter in their survival‐work. Expectations of personal resilience situated as necessary and as culturally appropriate in a Cambodian context mean, therefore, that women are disproportionally affected by domestic violence and forced eviction in both direct and indirect ways.

Home SOS demonstrates that while the home is implicated as an exclusionary and unhomely site of domestic violence and forced eviction in Cambodia, justice is simultaneously premised on (re)claiming the material and ontological security that it nominally affords. Yet it is this very vision of harmonious domestic life that is harnessed in governmental cultural logic and that exerts pressure on women especially to uphold home, and associated gender ideals, under challenging circumstances. In this cultural logic, the structural violence that women contend with is rendered visible. That the home is as much a symbolic as material entity is crucial in thinking through these geographies of violence. Symbolic violence, ‘the power of suggestion which is exerted through things and persons’ (Bourdieu 1991, p.52) has the potential to be lived in, and through, its walls.

In the light of these nuances and inconsistencies, the book connects with longstanding feminist debates on the tensions of romanticising versus rejecting home as an ideal (Varley 2008). It exposes why the home is so important for feminists and at the same time so problematic to valorise. As Eleanor Jupp (2017, p. 350) summarises, home ‘has, of course, been seen as the primary scene of women’s oppression within much feminist analysis. Its realisation has been seen to depend on the subordination of women’s own desires and projects, and exclusion from a public realm, as well as a place potentially of fear and violence.’ But while domestic space has been traditionally attributed to oppressive gender norms that run the danger of enshrining women in a ‘cult of domesticity’ (Safa 1995, p. 42), my own scholarship questions unnuanced and uncritical perspectives that risk delegitimising women’s sense of belonging, worth, and pride tied to their social reproduction of the family. A gender politics raised by the domestic sphere cuts both ways, with there being value in asserting the ‘value of domestic cultures and women’s creative shaping of them’ whilst at the same time avoiding ‘the risk of seeming to derive this tie from some kind of feminine “essence”’ (Fraiman 2017, p. 16).

The research in Home SOS indicates the dangers of foreclosing ideals for women to draw on in situations of domestic violence and/or forced eviction. This is because precarity ‘is directly linked to gender and sexual norms since those of us who do not live our genders and sexualities in “intelligible” ways risk violence, discrimination, harassment and death’ (Johnston 2018, p. 6). African‐American feminists (Collins 1998; hooks 1991) have been especially influential in critiquing assumptions about the home as an oppressive place for women, given discrimination faced in the public sphere. Seminal scholarship by bell Hooks (1991, p. 47) focuses on racialised processes of oppression through slavery and segregation and finds that it is ‘in that “homeplace” most often created and kept by black women, that we had the opportunity to grow and development to nurture our spirits’. Ideals of home that express human values of preservation, safety, and privacy are thus to be defended (Young 2005). This is because for many groups, including ‘the poor or transgendered person, the placeless immigrant or the woman on her own, aspiring to a safe, stable, affirming home doesn’t reinforce hierarchical social relations but is pitched, precisely, against them’ (Fraiman 2017, p.20).

Taking these viewpoints on board, Home SOS goes on to show how domesticity is an important coordinate of public value that can represent and function as a burden, but also as a resource, for those in SOS situations. It has the potential to be simultaneously disempowering and liberating. Research in Mexico by Mario Bruzzone (2017) focuses on Las Patronas, a charitable organisation of women who throw home‐cooked bags of rice and beans to migrants on passing freight trains driven north by poverty and violence. Their cooking not only fulfils gender roles and provides maternal authority, but also becomes a key ingredient in their push for social change. Gender ideals are thus strategically harnessed rather than simply conditioning of their experiences. Women’s ‘extensive domesticity’ (p. 247) thereby becomes a spatial strategy and spatial analytic to forward outward looking and political goals. Explored together in the book, the empirical material on domestic violence and forced eviction reveals how women cope with, and innovate from below, under regimes of bio‐necropower that render their homes and bodies materially, existentially, and socially precarious.