The label ‘housewife’ has become vexed to say the least. In Britain it is often understood as a derogatory term. It can evoke images of social and political isolation, the loss of individual identity, and an over-zealous pursuit to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ through competitive parenting and property. This stereotyping is dangerous.

Housewives are not monolithic creatures uniformly ordained into a self-serving cult of domesticity. We need to make more room to celebrate, rather than robotically deride women who identify themselves as housewives and who prioritise homemaking. This unjust vision of the disconnected and insular minded housewife does disservice to huge numbers of women in Britain and beyond who are actively using this role to benefit not only those who fall under their roofs, but also wider society.

Tep Vanny, Vital Voices award winner, speaking to the media outside the US Embassy calling for the release of Yorm Bopha (February, 2013)

Today, America Ferrera is in Washington DC to give an award that illustrates this very point. The Ugly Betty actress is presenting a ‘Vital Voices Leadership in Public Life Award’ to Tep Vanny, a self-branded housewife, who has become a guiding light in Cambodia’s battle against forced evictions. Carried out in the name of ‘progress’, forced evictions now rank as one of the world’s most serious human rights abuses. Amnesty International defines forced eviction when people are forced out of their homes and off their land against their will, with little notice or none at all, often with the threat or use of violence. And in Cambodia, a country devastated by the pursuit of profit, it is housewives who have come out fighting against them.

In 2007, the Chinese backed private development company Shukaku Inc, was granted a 99-year lease to build on and around Boeung Kak Lake in central Phnom Penh. The company went on to fill the lake with sand, destroying approximately 10,000 residents’ homes, and submerging peoples’ lives with it. Further still are under threat. As one community member told me as part of my academic research, the government ‘are trying to eradicate poverty by displacing the poor from the city where they can hide our poverty. This is what they mean by poverty eradication. They don’t care how we will survive, if we live or die. They ruin our homes, our incomes, we are left with absolutely nothing’.

Homes destroyed at Boeung Kak

Heng Mom staring across her submerged home (February 2013)

Western feminists should not lose sight of the fact that in many countries around the world, women’s role as wife and mother remains central to their family and societal status. When homes are threatened with destruction, it is women who are disproportionally affected. While women are commonly framed as defenceless ‘soft targets’ in forced evictions, Tep Vanny and her fellow housewives complicate this assumption. Harnessing softness as a strategy rather than hindrance, these women have committed themselves to a sustained campaign of non-violent protest. Worried that involving men would only encourage more extreme violence, ‘turning men into goldfish clashing with each other’, they are using their positions as wives and mothers to co-opt riot police through their songs of suffering, and morally shame them when they are publically beaten. Yet many have experienced arrest as a consequence of their activism, with Yorm Bopha still imprisoned despite international calls for her release.

In contrast to British stereotypes of the inward looking housewife, these women are committed housewives and forward thinking political activists. Their influence extends far beyond the homes they care for. Wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan ‘The Whole World is Watching’, one of the women explained that with guidance from NGOs, the group has become experts of spectacle courted by the international media. Exposing their bare breasts outside the Cambodian parliament, they aimed to demonstrate the vulnerability of being left only with their bodies. And donning birds’ nests complete with chicks on their heads, they came out in defence of their role as mother hens.

Not content with these national displays of resistance, the housewives took a lead role in submitting a complaint to the World Bank, insisting that it had breached its operational policies. The World Bank admitted that its land titling project had contributed to the harms suffered, and suspended its loans to Cambodia.

Campaign HQ for Boeung Kak women

The housewives of Boeung Kak are playing a critical leadership role in publically contesting large-scale losses of home that are being felt in communities sadly too numerous to name. In taking on this extra burden, housewives in Cambodia have become domestic goddesses battling global problems. While Nigella Lawson in How To Be a Domestic Goddess writes that baking is about ‘reclaiming our lost Eden’, for scores of women in the developing world, it is protest, not baking, that is being harnessed to secure ‘Eden’ – or more profoundly- basic human rights to adequate housing.

So what does this mean for the British housewife? While forced evictions are thankfully not a reality that we find on our front door steps, the courage of the Boeung Kak women is not without precedent in the UK. We only need to think back to Greenham Common in the 1980s for an example of housewife activists who fought to protect their families against the feared installment of nuclear weapons in Southern England. Both sets of women, whether in Cambodia or Britain, show the power that housewives can wield, of illuminating injustices at the highest of political levels.

Setting up camp at Greenham Common (BBC News In Pictures, September 2011)

An arrest at Greenham Common (BBC News In Pictures, September 2011)

Put to one side Nigella and her cake and we find other domestic goddesses at work. Tep Vanny and the women of Boeung Kak may not have won the geopolitical battle against forced evictions in Cambodia, but they have shown that housewives should not be slated, but rewarded, for their inspirational dedication to domestic life.

Research: In February I travelled to Cambodia to spend the month working on the qualitative aspect of the ESRC/DFID project which is looking to understand the hiatus between legislative change and quality of life improvements for women (see here for the participatory video workshops and large-scale quantitative survey completed in 2012). After providing training in Phnom Penh, I spent 3 days in Pursat province with the project’s coordinator, Reaksmey, and two research assistants, Chandy and Davy. We piloted interviews with men and women at the village level to understand their knowledge, use of, and perspectives to, the law as well as associated issues around women’s rights. After a solid six weeks of further fieldwork by the team, we are now the proud custodians of audio material currently being translated and transcribed from 80 participants, 40 of whom had direct experience of domestic violence in Pursat and Siem Reap provinces.

Domestic violence prevention poster in rural Pursat

A second research project also took shape. Entitled ‘Intimate Geopolitics: Women, Home-grown Activism, and Forced Evictions in Cambodia’ I interviewed 20 women who are being threatened with, or have been, evicted from their homes. In the name of economic development and urban modernisation, thousands of homes in Cambodia are being demolished. And it is women who have increasingly come to the forefront of the battle against forced evictions. I concentrated on two communities, Boeung Kak Lake, at the front line of protests (as I witnessed outside the US Embassy), and Trapeang Anh Chan re-settlement site where displaced railway inhabitants have been controversially moved to.

Empty plots at Trapeang Anh Chan 'resettlement' site

UN Learning Seminar: During my trip to Cambodia I also delivered a United Nations Learning Seminar in Phnom Penh. A Joint UN Learning Needs Assessment conducted in 2012 identified the need for, and interest of, UN staff in participating in learning events focused on gender mainstreaming and critical thinking skills. I presented a research paper based on a book I planning entitled ‘Home S.O.S: Gender, Violence and Rights in Cambodia’. Covering timely issues from marital breakdown, domestic violence and forced eviction, the seminar foregrounded how domestic life in Cambodia is a current-day political background for human rights issues.

Presenting at the UN Learning Seminar with Reaksmey to my left

UK Select Committee on Violence against Women and Girls: For the first time I wrote a written submission for a parliamentary Select Committee. In my submission I outlined three (and inter-related) areas of concern that I argued the UK government should act upon further in respect to violence against women: legal reform; social norms; and the domestic sphere. My full report can be found here.

Guardian Development Network: Another first was writing an opinion piece called ‘Legal reform is not the silver bullet to free women from violence’. Reflecting on the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW57) drawing to a close in New York, the article explored why discriminatory gender norms are hindering women’s ability to claim rights accorded to them. The full piece can be found here.

The rest of 2013 should be equally as exciting. For the ESRC/DFID project we are moving into the final research phase with stakeholders who hold responsibility for implementing and enforcing Cambodia’s domestic violence law. I will be speaking on a Women and Geography Study Group (WGSG) plenary panel (again for the first time!) at the Royal Geographical Society with Institute of British Geographers Annual Conference in London on ‘Gendered Violences’; and hopefully providing comments to UNWomen on Cambodia’s 2nd National Action to Prevent Violence against Women.

Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London

(Co-sponsored by Participatory Geographies Research Group and Political Geography Research Group)

Researching violence, whether its prevalence, perceptions of it or its prevention is beset by methodological and ethical complexities. Many types of violence, such as that occurring in ‘private’ spaces of the home or intimate relationships can rarely be directly observed. Women are particularly affected by this ‘hidden’ violence. Additionally, conventional methods of interviews and surveys have often been limited in understanding the complexities of violence or capturing the temporal and spatial dynamics of violent events. Whether violence occurs in ‘private’ or ‘public’ spaces, however, the emotive and sensitive nature of the topic creates methodological challenges. The potential to cause harm, direct or indirect, to participants (as well as to researchers) makes violence an unsettling choice of research.

Yet, researching violence (and its absences) also has the potential to lead to positive change and to redress what has been identified as an overwhelming focus on ‘war’ or conflict in comparison to ‘peace’ in political geographical research. This can be approached both indirectly, through new understandings gleaned, and directly, through participation in research itself – ‘getting messy’ by moving beyond ‘dry and distant analysis’ as Sara Koopman (2011) has termed this. This could be pursued, for example, through facilitating processes that confront violent views or through creating safe spaces for those who have experienced violence to come to terms with their experiences. In this vein, the session is again interested in the recent and growing focus of Geographers on the inter-relations between ‘war’ and ‘peace’ (Loyd, 2012; Megoran, 2010; Williams and McConnell, 2011). What methodological approaches can scholars use to explore their mutual constitution and the potential for transition between violence to peace? How have Geographers become purposely or unintentionally entangled in such (everyday) politics through their fieldwork?

Taking the above into account, researching bodies, spaces and scales between violence and peace can be seen as a ‘new frontier’ in geographical research, an arena requiring innovative approaches, but through which societal challenges can be addressed. Abstracts are invited which reflect on methodological challenges or discuss innovative approaches relating to any aspect of violence, peace, justice or hope. Themes could include (but are not limited to):

• Participatory methods
• Ethics and harm in violence research
• Challenging violence through research
• Research with children
• Research in conflict zones
• Measuring prevalence
• Capturing dynamics of violence/peace
• Understanding perceptions of violence/peace

We are looking for abstracts of 300 words to be sent to Mary.Cobbett.2012@live.rhul.ac.uk by Wednesday 30th January 2013.

ESRC postgraduate funding

South East Doctoral Training Centre

CAFOD

RHUL Geography

RHUL doctoral supervisor, Dr Katherine Brickell

Application procedure

Candidates must meet the following criteria to apply:

- Only Home and EU students are eligible to apply (due to ESRC stipulations)
- EU students must have been resident in the UK for more than 3 years on 30th September 2013
- Have, or be projected to achieve, a first-class social science undergraduate degree or at least a 2:1 if the candidate is undertaking or has undertaken a relevant Masters degree.
- Have prior academic knowledge of one or more of the following areas: development geography/development studies, gender, faith and religion.
- Be able to collaboratively work on the proposal with RHUL in December 2012 and January 2013.
- Be able to take up the funding, if awarded, in September 2013

Interested candidates should provide the following to Katherine.brickell@rhul.ac.uk by Friday November 30th 2012:

- CV
- Scan of Degree Transcripts

Any general questions can also be directed to Katherine as above.

Job description
GADC are looking to hire 2 researchers (1 female and 1 male) for a period of 28 working days between Monday 4th February & Monday 11th March. The positions will include qualitative methods training held in Phnom Penh. The two researchers will conduct in-depth interviews in Siem Reap and Pursat Province on domestic violence and legal reform in selected communes. The researchers will be responsible for recording and filing digital voice files of these interviews.

The qualitative researchers MUST be prepared to travel for all of the above period. They should speak fluent Khmer but do not need to speak English, although this would be desirable. Successful applicants should have a degree in a social science related discipline (or be close to finishing) and will ideally have practical experience of conducting interviews in community settings. Preference will be given to students who have knowledge and understanding of gender issues and an awareness of research ethics.

Further conditions: Travel, accommodation and subsistence will be covered by GADC based on procurement and financial policy and along with a fixed payment of US$600 for each researcher.

Reporting: The researchers will report back to Ms Prak Bureaksmey, Project Coordinator via email pc-research@gadc.org.kh and Dr Katherine Brickell, Principal Investigator via Katherine.brickell@rhul.ac.uk.

Further information about the project can be found here.

Interested applicants are requested to provide via email to info@gadc.org.kh a copy of CV with cover letter and the names of two referees. These can alternatively been handed into the GADC office, #89, Street 288, Sangkat Olympic, Khan Chamcar Morn, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, by Friday of November 23, 2012 at 5:00pm.

Please note that only short listed applicants will be contacted and documents submitted will not be returned

Employer information
Background: Gender and Development for Cambodia (GADC) is a local non-profit and non-political organization. It was admitted to the NGO Good Practice Programme (NGO-GPP) for its compliance with all standards in the Code of Ethical Principles and Minimum Standard for NGO in August 2011.

GADC’s vision: Cambodia upholds the principle of justice and the rule of law in which women and men are equally empowered to participate in development and to access, use and protect their rights.

GADC’s mission: GADC works to promote gender equality as a fundamental human rights, which are necessary for Cambodia’s social, economic and political development.

GADC works in cooperation with the Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC) and members of civil society organizations to advocate for gender sensitive projects/programmes, national laws and policies formulation in Cambodia. The advocacy for gender sensitivities in laws and policies is related to GADC’s emphasis on the need to shift from a focus on women’s roles in development towards a consideration of gendered relations of power, including access to and control over resources, and decision-making by women and men. GADC serves as an intermediary in which information flows between the national and subnational levels (including the grassroots). This intermediary role allows for local needs being responded by the government and national level policies are informed. Calls are made for applications by qualified Cambodian candidates for two ‘Qualitative Researchers’ requiring extensive travel within Cambodia.

Joint funded for 3 years by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and UK Department for International Development (DFID), the project involves Phnom Penh based Dr Bunnak Poch from Western University and NGO partner Gender and Development/Cambodia (GAD/C). Concentrating on the 2005 ‘Law on the Prevention of Domestic Violence and the Protection of the Victims’, we have adopted an innovative mixed method approach to understand the everyday politics of translating the rights accorded by the law into quality of life improvements. Although interviews with female and male householders, commune/ provincial leaders, police officers, judicial and legal staff won’t start until February 2013, we can provide a few insights into what we have done so far.

The four participatory video workshops acted as a voice-raising tool to highlight community-level perspectives on domestic violence (law) and through the involvement of GAD/C staff as participants with villagers, provided a learning ground for future workshops independently organised by the NGO (all equipment will remain post-project). Organised by Prak Baureaksmey and facilitated by Brad Garrett and Phorn Paul, the workshops encompassed technical training (including editing), community mapping, storyboarding of participatory video drama, and commune-level screenings.

Peer to peer film skills training, Siem Reap (July, 2012)

Shot type challenge review, Kralanh District, Siem Reap Province (July, 2012)

Group discussion of community mapping exercise, Siem Reap (July, 2012)

Facilitators in conversation with participants, Siem Reap (July, 2012)

Participatory video drama acting, Kralanh District, Siem Reap Province (July, 2012)

Of interest in this process were issues around the politics and dynamics of participation which came to the forefront and which we intend to write more formally about. The similarity between videos is also something that requires further analysis. All the videos (including below which the community gave us permission to show) began with the premise that violence is caused by men’s consumption of alcohol – a sticky and persistent assumption in Cambodia that has been brought to task in feminist research more broadly (see my 2008 paper on this). The videos also all ended with successful reconciliatory efforts on the part of the commune to alter men’s behavior towards their wives and children. In multiple senses then, the participatory video work usefully illuminated normative beliefs about the causes and idealized solutions to domestic violence that law implementation strategies in the country would need to tackle.

The quantitative research led by Bunnak Poch consisted of a large-scale household-survey. It was designed to ensure that experiences and perspectives on domestic violence and its reduction were not only framed around spousal relationships. Instead intergenerational data was sought on these themes in addition to testing knowledge and understanding of key principles of the ‘2005 law’. Few studies have ever combined quantitative surveys in close dialogue with qualitative methods to understand the consequences and processes of violence at the micro-level, with fewer still capturing legal knowledge. Trained undergraduate students, whom for many this was their first experience working ‘in the field’, administered the survey. This part of the study is at the data-entry stage.

Household survey (August 2012)

Thank you meal for student researchers, Siem Reap (August 2012)

For more information on the project, please contact me.

Home, (in)security and gender: Showcased throughout AC2012, but particularly evident in the Gender, Justice and Security and Home Unmaking sessions, a range of gendered vulnerabilities were exposed, from domestic violence (Bowstead) to home dispossession linked to marital breakdown (Brickell). Kicking off the conference however was Jennifer Fluri’s paper on ‘Citizenship, civilians and scaling the security state: the gendering of civilian sites of (in)securities’. Highlighting US Female Engagement Teams (FETS) in Afghanistan, Jennifer showed the heightened role of female Marines in operationalising access into the ‘private’ terrains of the War on Terror. The presentation explained how the escalation of women’s once denied combat roles had become framed as a step forward in equality as their ‘hidden talents’ were revealed. Described as ‘pioneers’ by Jill Biden (wife of Vice President Joe Biden), the analyses provided stemmed from a White House promotional video:

Watching the film again, despite the rhetorical ‘big step’ forward narrated, the FETs are essentially re-harnessed within a cult of domesticity in which their biology becomes determinate of their public value to the US military. Able to cross sexual boundaries of ‘public’ and ‘private’ wired into Afghan society, uncritical notions of global sisterhood are drawn upon to emphasise natural affinity and shared connections on the basis of gender. Jennifer’s engaging plenary talk, alongside rich work in other sessions, conveys a growing dynamism between critical geographies of home literature and that of political geography broadly defined.

Home, temporality and materiality: Material and ontological security being contingent on different temporalities and temporal moments was a second overarching idea that arose in AC2012. In the first (of two) sessions I convened with Richard Baxter on Home Unmaking, diverse ideas about temporality or ‘churn’ as Jane Jacobs phrased it in question time, could be traced across papers. In her paper on ‘Unmaking Red Road’ (in addition to wider sessions on the demise of the Glasgow estate), Jane carefully documented the gradual hollowing out of the towers earmarked for destruction, from the removal of its inhabitants, to its internal stripping of asbestos. Framed around the material wasting of the building, the paper went on to foreground acute temporal moments that shaped its un-doing, with the death of an ideology of mass housing realised through the spectacle of demolition in June 2012.

Red Road demolition June 2012 (Source: Urban Realm)

From the apocalyptic to the mundane, Richard Baxter’s paper, also on high-rise housing, considered finer grained experiences of the unhomely. Faced with hundreds of cockroaches greeting him, Mr Dobbins’ inability to make home (as pests had) was vividly described as his frequent efforts for permanence were thwarted by a long-standing and ever worsening decline in the exterior integrity of the housing block. Mara Ferreri’s work on property guardians living in Camelot managed UK commercial and residential premises, on the other hand, showed how degradation and temporality can be something that is potential embraced and can even lead to a sense of creative liberation. While glamorised in print magazines and newspapers, Mara sensitively documented what has become central to analyses in the geographies of home literature – the ambiguity of experience – in which inspirational living can come to coexist with stress and anxiety given the lack of occupiers rights in such properties.

Home economics and care: Interpenetrations of home and insecurity were revealed in two particular presentations in which the hard edge of the economy took centre stage. For many years, Susan Smith (2008) has been urging more understanding of the ‘flows of credit and cash which crystallize into (and increasingly seep out of) these structures’. In her lecture at AC2012, this important issue was squarely present as she detailed the growing increase in mortgage debt in the Western world and its intimate relationship to serial equity borrowing by homeowners. The lecture continued to detail the growing insecurity in the housing market with deregulation and families’ growing reliance on such equity withdrawal to bolster incomes and deal with bouts of unemployment, scars of divorce, and the effects of a diminished welfare state.

These circumstances, Susan argues, have rendered home particularly vulnerable to the actions of distanced bankers despite householders’ financial and affective investments in home as a storage cupboard of security. It is this assumed security – and a desire to provision it at whatever cost – that has fuelled, and arguably been exploited by, financiers whose dubious ethics have compounded the vulnerability of those whose are forced to use their tangible assets to off-set the growing economic unsustainability of peoples’ everyday lives. The demand that Susan makes at the end of the lecture for virtuosity and care to be instilled into market innovations is one that was also echoed in Kathy Burrell’s paper on low-income communities of Leicester whose lives have become increasingly under the control of private landlords. Calling for a dedicated focus on these under-studied domestic actors, Kathy shows on a very personal level the lengths that tenants go to circumvent the poor quality of housing they have to contend with due to uncaring landlords. Like Susan, she highlights the constraints that households face, moves to better housing curtailed by unemployment and/or strict tenancy agreements. The presentation also brought to the fore the overlooked question of population turnover as a part of neighbourhood experience and it’s perceived relationship to the unhomely. Again emphasising the significance of temporality, Kathy described how tenants often re-arrange the layout of their homes by moving the living room to the back of their properties so as to distance themselves from the disturbances of the street – children, noise, smell, anti-social behaviour – and a lack of community cohesion which stifles home making. The presentations by Susan and Kathy were particularly complimentary; paving the way for more interlinking between issues pertained to in housing studies and in studies of home.

Beyond AC2012: Overall AC2012 has for me, at least, been a valuable forum for discussing home matters and for emphasising that home matters. As Paula Meth voiced in her paper on the state-led upgrading of informal housing in South Africa, whilst housing stories are not always negative, a focus on insecurities necessitates a political impetuous to fix what is broken. Geographers’ have a role to play in aiding analysis of the security/insecurity nexus so as to politicise claims to justice in, and beyond, the home.

AC2012 papers on home (if I have missed any out please add in the ‘leave a reply’ box below):

Brickell, Katherine – ‘Plates in a basket will rattle’: Marital dissolution and home ‘unmaking’ in contemporary Cambodia.

Baxter, Richard – Unmaking home making? Thinking through unmaking via the domestic high rise in London. Session 119.

Bowstead, Janet – Seeking security/seeking: women’s journeys in response to domestic violence. Session 11.

Burrell, Kathy – The destabilisation of the post-industrial urban home: everyday life in a transient area of Leicester. Session 119.

Carlsson-Hyslop, Anna – Space heating and leisure in the post-war British home. Session 167.

Cohen, Nir & Margalit, Talia – We’re insecure in our own homes: spaces of (sub)urban citizenship in Southern Tel Aviv. Session 197.

Daya, Shari & Wilkins, Nicola  – The body, the shelter, and the shebeen: Affective geographies of homelessness in South Africa. Session 79.

Endres, Marcel – ‘Home is wherever I am’: Dwelling under conditions of extreme mobility. Session 121.

Ferreri, Mara – Security by occupation: home (un)making experiences of precarious live-in guardians. Session 119.

Fluri, Jennifer – Citizenship, civilians and scaling the security state: the gendering of civilian sites of (in)securities. Session 1.

Gilbert, Hannah – Haunting houses, healing hearts: Space, place and the presence of the dead. Session 254.

Humes, Nicholas & Tweed, Christopher – Field study of how consumer use of new heating technologies has affected comfort in the home. Session 126.

Jervis-Reed, Cressida – Home/house/hearth: Narratives of home unmaking in a slum clearance neighbourhood in Delhi. Session 142.

Klaasens, Mirjam & Merijering, Louise – The search for home within an institutional setting: Participatory approach within a healthcare institution in the Netherlands. Session 154.

Jacobs, Jane; Cairns, Stephen & Strebel, Ignaz – Unmaking Red Road. Session 119.

Meth, Paula – No place for binaries? Conceptualising home making and unmaking. Session 142.

Neven, Louis; Walker, Gordon & Brown, Sam – Care, comfort and collective living spaces: the use and impact of sustainable heating technologies in care homes. Session 126.

Pain, Rachel – Bringing terrorism home: fear, security and domestic violence. Session 181.

Raven-Ellison, Menah – Home beyond detention. Session 11.

Saunders, Angharad – Violating the domestic: unmaking the home in Edwardian fiction. Session 142.

Smith, Susan J – Security and insecurity at home: A spatial financial paradox. Session 3.

Stocks-Rankin, Catherine-Rose – Mapping relationships: An exploration of contracting for care homes in Scotland. Session 65.

“I’m asking people a very big thing, which is to elect me as their prime minister. And I think people have a right to know a bit more about you, your life and your family, what makes you tick, and what informs your thinking. And to me, nothing informs my thinking more than family because I think it’s the most important thing there is in our society. So that’s why I did what I did.”

The Prime Minister’s performed domesticity on ‘Webcameron’ is a casing example of what he himself refers to as doing ‘modern politics’ . Started in 2006, the video blog aims to forge a ‘personal’ connection with voters by emphasizing Cameron’s proficient and caring fathering of a young family. In one ‘classic’ 2008 video, we find the leader foregrounded in his kitchen, with a pan away briefly allowing the family’s washing to come into view.

Talking politics at the same time as fending off the demands of his offspring and trying to wash up, Cameron’s juggling capabilities are showcased. It is no accident that such (fictive) capabilities have been staged in the kitchen. In cultural geography scholarship, the kitchen has been space which is both intimately and socially significant, it is where ’the raw, the unclean and the defiled are brought, and where the social rules attendant on civilized life are reiterated, where status is confirmed’ (Floyd). Cameron’s active fathering thus ‘civilises’ that which must be tamed.

According to Angela Smith, whilst in the past, a leader’s fatherhood status was limited to playing with their children on camera to present themselves as ‘fathers of the nation…without the effeminate distraction of childcare’, today the situation appears quite different. Since the 1990s, it is male leaders who have tactically sold the personal as political. The private sphere has been harnessed to manufacture a political identity which embraces fairy liquid and an emotional literacy akin to a ‘new man’. Whilst the first response on ‘You Tube’ to the clip reads “I want to punch him”, the campaign was launched to elicit a more positive reaction – the female vote. Whilst feminist geopolitics tends to call for engagement outside the formal sphere of the state, Cameron’s strategic domesticity shows the importance of researching micro-spaces such as the kitchen which are in many ways ‘state-facing’. As Ana Langer writes, ‘Cameron has worked hard at using his behavior in the private sphere for authenticating his political positions and “de-contaminating” the party brand’. Once again then, the home is shown to be an intensely geopolitical site worthy of more dedicated attention. In this case, quite literally trying to clean up the Tories’ act.

]]> http://www.katherinebrickell.com/2012/06/13/on-not-leaving-your-daughter-in-the-pub-public-fatherhood-and-kitchen-politics-cameron-style/feed/ 0 http://www.katherinebrickell.com/2012/06/04/geopolitics-of-home-public-domesticity-in-hong-kong-and-london/ http://www.katherinebrickell.com/2012/06/04/geopolitics-of-home-public-domesticity-in-hong-kong-and-london/#comments Mon, 04 Jun 2012 21:55:46 +0000 katherine http://www.katherinebrickell.com/?p=315 This is the first of a series of blogs I will be writing this year on what I call ‘geopolitics of home’. Given recent controversy over the prospect of Londoner’s homes being used as army missile launch pads during the 2012 London Olympics, it feels timely to look at the intimate relationship between home and geopolitics. However, this first post does not begin in my home city of London, but in Hong Kong.

En route to Cambodia recently, I stopped for a few hours in the former British colony. It was a Sunday, the day of the week when public displays of domesticity fill the streets of the central business district. Under HSBC headquarters, the bowels of corporate Asia, I came across two groups of geopolitical actors –Filipino domestic workers and Occupy activists.

Whilst pushed to the periphery of the shaded area under HSBC by Occupy Hong Kong, Filipino maids remain definitive figures in the global political economy of migration. On Sundays, Filipinos largely engaged in domestic work routinely colonize the space of the central business district after attending church. As Lisa Law detailed in her 2001 research, every week the area becomes ‘a home from home for migrant women, a place of remembering and forgetting, and a lively place full of laughter, songs and home cooking’. Defying domestic disappearance, these gatherings are also, according to Law, sites of political agency where migrants form hometown associations that engage in philanthropy and political action at home and support internal migration within the Philippines. Momentarily leaving their home-based working lives, the women domesticate ‘unhomely’ urban space through eating and dancing together.

Dancing in Hong Kong, April 2012 (Source: Katherine Brickell)

Taking root in October 2011, Occupy Hong Kong has also domesticated public/private urban space through the presence of all the paraphernalia of a home away from home. Cooking takes place in makeshift kitchens, flowers are arranged on living room sideboards, bodies relax on sofas placed around the invisible walls of a living room. This public display of domesticity indicates how the materiality of home literally and metaphorically furnishes the legitimacy of the camp’s existence through the creation of a homely space in the face of mounting dissatisfaction with the unaffordability of housing in the city. The tents of Hong Kong are thus a communal expression of dismay, discontent and dispossession in a city which has some of the most expensive property prices in the world. The BBC reports that it is newly affluent mainland Chinese snapping up this property and pushing up prices.

Sunday in Hong Kong under HSBC, April 2012 (Source: Katherine Brickell)

Occupy Hong Kong camp, April 2012 (Source: Katherine Brickell)

Occupy Hong Kong (Source: Remko Tanis)

Returning back to London, there is also the opportunity to think further about these domestication tactics and the politics of inhabitation. In London, this politics settled on the private spaces installed in the St. Paul’s and Finsbury Square camp and the UK media claiming that they were in fact ‘un occupied’ at night. Under such scrutiny, the purported lack of embodied presence overnight undermined the protestors’ legitimacy and commitment. Yet photojournalism catalogues some of the communal and private traces of activity and inhabitance in the tents which according to Ben Roberts ‘serve as a document of the intense utilization of a limited space by a large number of both permanent and temporary residents’. Future studies could thus productively explore how private spaces of political protest can be used to strategically destabilise meanings of public space by highlighting intimate (visual) narratives of domestication. Both the example of Filipino domestic workers and Occupy movements are thus fascinating displays of ‘intimate geopolitics’.

Occupied Spaces, London (Source: Ben Roberts)