The Mundane and the Extreme: Women’s Experiences of Housework and Marital Violence in India

Abstract

Mainstream theories tend to consider housework a form of labor and its gendered division a result of resource exchange or bargaining and an act of “doing gender.” These theories, however, insufficiently reflect the centrality of housework in many women’s lived experiences of marital violence, particularly in the Global South. Our in-depth interviews with 22 women survivors of marital violence from Assam, India, show that housework features prominently in the women’s experiences of marital violence. Drawing on our interviews, we show that marital violence can manifest in and through housework in three interlinked dimensions: (1) the coercive enforcement of how, when, and to what standard housework is performed; (2) the physical and mental harms inflicted in and through housework; and (3) the restrictions it imposes on women’s capabilities in other life domains. Uniting gender research on housework and marital violence, our study shows how a violence lens helps render visible the ways in which housework may be organized, enforced, and experienced for some women. In doing so, it highlights that the mundane (housework) and the extreme (violence) are not separate regimes of gender control and demonstrates how they intersect to (re)produce domestic gender inequality.