Intimate Evictability: Urban Displacement, Familial Violence and Women’s Claim to Home in Urban Sri Lanka

TY - JOUR

T1 - Intimate Evictability

T2 - Urban Displacement, Familial Violence and Women’s Claim to Home in Urban Sri Lanka

AU - Abeyasekera, Asha Lalanie

N1 - © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

PY - 2023/7/30

Y1 - 2023/7/30

N2 - ‘Evictability’ describes the role urban displacements play in the governance of ‘unwanted’ citizens in Europe where eviction is imminent yet uncertain. This paper proposes ‘intimate evictability’. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Colombo, Sri Lanka, the paper illuminates how the governance of the working-class poor via eviction and relocation interfaces with the intimate sphere to produce hostilities between kin. The life-stories of four women illustrate how state policies that discard the poor by denying their right to a home percolate to the home in the form of inheritance disputes and domestic violence. The dual effects of urban displacement and familial violence, the paper argues, is a gendered form of ‘slow violence’ occurring on multiple scales. This paper makes a case for why bureaucratic processes that ‘other’ the poor must be read as existing on the same continuum as acrimonious kinship relations that are about discarding unwanted women from home and family.

AB - ‘Evictability’ describes the role urban displacements play in the governance of ‘unwanted’ citizens in Europe where eviction is imminent yet uncertain. This paper proposes ‘intimate evictability’. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Colombo, Sri Lanka, the paper illuminates how the governance of the working-class poor via eviction and relocation interfaces with the intimate sphere to produce hostilities between kin. The life-stories of four women illustrate how state policies that discard the poor by denying their right to a home percolate to the home in the form of inheritance disputes and domestic violence. The dual effects of urban displacement and familial violence, the paper argues, is a gendered form of ‘slow violence’ occurring on multiple scales. This paper makes a case for why bureaucratic processes that ‘other’ the poor must be read as existing on the same continuum as acrimonious kinship relations that are about discarding unwanted women from home and family.

KW - home

KW - familial violence

KW - urban displacement

KW - urban regeneration

KW - Sri Lanka

U2 - 10.1080/00141844.2023.2240537

DO - 10.1080/00141844.2023.2240537

M3 - Article

SN - 0014-1844

JO - Ethnos. Journal of Anthropology

JF - Ethnos. Journal of Anthropology

ER -