Homemaking: Gender, safety, and place in Massachusetts battered women's shelters

Represented as a problem of social isolation and dependency, public responses to domestic violence increasingly identify community belonging as the foundation of battered women's security. To effect victims' transition from isolation to community, domestic violence nonprofits use shelter architecture and social space as therapeutic techniques, drawing upon idealized cultural constructions of domestic privacy to transform the home from a scene of victimization into the locus of women's empowerment. Integrating liberal feminist commitments to women's empowerment with the key words of neoliberal welfare reform-dependency and self-sufficiency-domestic violence shelter space and practice offer battered women a blueprint of familial tranquility and social membership attainable through middle class norms of domestic privacy and maternal responsibility. Incorporating anthropological, socio-legal and media studies frameworks, the dissertation explores the convergence of feminist legacies and neoliberal rationalities in the everyday spatial practice of women's security and transition in Massachusetts' shelter network.;The ethnographic analysis originates in 11 months of fieldwork in Massachusetts' domestic violence shelter system including extensive participant-observation; shelter tours; interviews with architects, direct service, and advocacy professionals; and collected government documents. I argue that professionals communicate security and empowerment to battered women by inscribing idealized cultural constructions of home, privacy and motherhood in the shelter's architecture, time-lines and programming. Victims' conformity with this gendered security ideal promises familial stability and self-sufficiency, while discourses of personal choice rationalize homelessness as the moral outcome of risky decisions. I conclude that producing and habituating domestic space is a gendered, economic condition of social membership that illuminates the governance of gender subjectivity under the auspices of women's empowerment.