Carceral and colonial domesticities: Subaltern case geographies of a Delhi rescue home

Abstract

This article explores a relatively rare archival account of female subjectivity, experience, mobility, and voice within a carceral institution in late-colonial Delhi. The capital’s “Rescue Home” was created to house women and girls removed from the city’s brothels under new legislation. While no brothels were closed in the first year of the laws functioning, the home accepted 18 women and girls and detailed their circumstances and experiences in its 1940 report. It was able to forcibly detain girls and was run upon disciplinary and racial lines, like other colonial institutions. But its inhabitants were not subject to detailed surveillance. Rather, their lives were ones usually beyond recording or whose stories were actively silenced. The 1940 Rescue Home report provides us with rich details of the commonplace, quotidian struggles which women and girls faced in colonial Delhi. The 18 case geographies of the Home’s inhabitants help us understand how sexuality and motherhood, education and character, and race all shaped routes into the home and destinations when people left. The accounts tell us of a carceral governmentality with influence beyond the disciplinary institution’s walls, but also of female subjects who resisted, spoke back, and absconded. This relationship between forced immobility and willed mobility suggests that brothels and rescue homes were not just connected, through the intended transfer of inhabitants, but can be directly compared as carceral domesticities.

Atmospheric negations: Weaponising breathing, attuning irreducible bodies

“…While in a case of colonial violence in Palestine this might mean, as Christopher Harker (2014) writes, that attention needs to be paid to the life of those to whom the weaponisation of air is all but remote, it further resonates with the bodily intimacy many feminist geographers have addressed as a key for comprehending politics (e.g. Hyndman, 2019; Sharp, 2021; see also Legg, 2023). Indeed, breathing is not only passive inhaling that receives poisonous gases lingering in its spheric nearness; it is also about exhaling and interaction that produce material and affective spheres, as the COVID-19 pandemic has exemplified, through the pathogenic contamination of air and the fear of breathing the same air with the others.…”

Gendered disciplinary apparatuses and carceral domesticities in Singapore’s labour-migration regime

“…Indeed, carceral geographers have demonstrated the importance of the 'punitive turn' (Cassidy et al, 2020;Moran, 2015;Moran et al, 2018) and the relationship between punishment, carcerality, and immigrant deterrence, control, and removal (Loyd et al, 2012;Moran et al, 2016;Mountz et al, 2013). While largely US-and Euro-centric, there has also been important scholarship which explores the practices and processes of colonisation, and the ways in which punishment, discipline, and carceral governmentalities have shaped societies historically and contemporarily (Legg, 2014(Legg, , 2023Radics, 2023;Sen, 2000Sen, , 2012. However, Cassidy et al (2020) point to the significant and somewhat surprising theoretical and empirical gaps at the intersection of carceral and labour geographies.…”