Domestic violence, coercive control and mental health in a pandemic: disenthralling the ecology of the domestic

Abstract

Domestic and family violence is a social and public health issue typically positioned in policy frameworks as a consequence of gendered social and economic structures. In this paper, we deploy an approach that draws on Hörl's neo-ecological thinking to propose that the home, as a site of domestic violence, can be usefully framed as an ecology of the domestic, a posthumanist hybrid matrix of bodies, spaces, and objects in which various practices enact the smooth running of the domestic together with practices of domestic and family violence, including coercive control. Our interest is in coercive control and in the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic had on practices which enact this aspect of domestic violence. Our exploration of the practices that enact coercive control draw on the work of Law and others.We examine how practices which are not compatible, or that do not cohere, are able to coexist in a domestic ecology and what occurs when there is a disruption as occurred with the pandemic.

The drinking at home woman: Between alcohol harms and domestic experiments

“…Jenkins and Smith's notion of requisition makes clear that the domestic sites of drinking under lockdown were dynamic and fragile ecologies of bodies, time and space, not just bounded, static places. In an insightful analysis of coercive control in the pandemic, McCallum and Rose (2021) deploy the concept of domestic ecologies to highlight how women altered and reinvented their practices to actively manage the new and dangerous situation of being locked down with abusive partners. Through a composite character they call Miranda, they examine domestic ecologies of money, space, time, technology and pets.…”

“…To be clear, I am using narcofeminism for a particular purpose, that of exploring the unexpected new pleasures and possibilities enabled by domestic spaces altered by pandemic responses. In this speculation, I draw on two main conceptual resources: work that develops the idea of domestic ecology to think about the materiality of the modern home (Hollingshead, 2020; McCallum & Rose, 2021) and research on drug use and experimentation in LGBTQ cultures (Pienaar et al, 2020; Race et al, 2022).…”