Domestic belongings: Intimate security and the racial politics of scale

Geopolitics of Home

“…Echoing ‘realist‐inspired traditional geopolitics’, this ideal of governmentality constructs the international realm as distinct from the domestic, one in which sovereign power within the nation‐state is absolute (Dodds 1996, 573). The conceptual emphasis of scholarship has progressed however to concentrate on the interpenetration of the geopolitical and intimate (Caluya 2010; Mountz and Hyndman 2006). The interconnections between places such as the border, home and body has been captured in Berelowitz’s (2005) analysis of the ways that artists in the San Diego Tijuana borderlands of the United States have represented domestic spaces from the late 1960s to the present.…”

“…In this sense, as Dodds (2008) contends in relation to film, the creative process of representing the war on terror encompasses not just the battlefields of Iraq or the mountains of Afghanistan, but also domestic spaces which play a critical role in shaping the identities of the protagonists and associated events. Caluya (2010, 208) has traced, for example, the creation of fear within the Australian media of 'homegrown' terrorism which has turned the family home ‘into a space for the cultivation of a suspicious citizenship’. It is purported that ‘the great Australian dream of owning your own home has been twisted uncannily to hide the criminal intentions of malevolent (Caluya 2010, 208).…”

“…As Philo (2012, 2) illuminates in respect to ‘homeland security’, this phrase implies that ‘actions on a national, even global, stage can readily be allied with protecting the intimate spaces of domesticity, the home and hearth, potentially stirring into the mix of geopolitical praxis deeply problematic connotations about who “we” would wish to invite into or, more tellingly, debar from “our” cozy homes’. Unlike some other scalar epistemologies then, the home exhibits a ‘certain plastic tendency that enables its boundaries to expand and shrink’ (Caluya 2010, 204). The resultant need to re‐scale existing scholarship has been recognized as critical and feminist researchers emphasized the geopolitical significance of the everyday (Coomes 2011; Hyndman 2004; Oswin and Olund 2010; Wallace 2011).…”

Pride and paranoia: race and the emergence of home security in Cold War America

“…My interest in the emergence of home security systems in America grows out of a larger research project to trace what I have been calling 'intimate security', which I have used to name both the privatization of security and the increasing securitization of intimacy from the late twentieth century onwards (see Caluya 2007Caluya , 2011Caluya, Germon, and Probyn, 2014). This article focuses on the first process, the privatization of security, which builds on an earlier article (Caluya 2007) where I analysed the emergence of 'defensible space' and 'crime prevention through environmental design' (CPTED) in 1970s America.…”

UnMaking Public Housing Towers

“…[txt]My overarching approach to Las Gladiolas' deterioration and demolition is inspired instead by geographical work that extends an understanding of the home to include multiple spatial, temporal, political, and psychic/subjective scales and combines a recognition of the social and material interrelations of the home with imaginary realms; with the political at different scales; the subjective and collective; and the past, present, and future (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 27;Brickell 2012aBrickell , b, 2014Caluya 2010). Rethinking the home and the ways it is unmade along such multiscalar geographies allows for an analysis of the deteriorated lifts and stairs as building technologies that contain and evoke past and present personal and community struggles, articulated through narratives of racialized, gendered, and class-based senses of place.…”