Invasion as Trespassing Spatial Boundaries

Abstract

The surge in domestic violence (DV), akin to a lurking shadow, coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This ‘shadow pandemic’ prompts me to explore the intricate interplay of spatial dynamics between DV and the COVID-19 containment measures. Mirroring the spatial patterns seen in DV, the pandemic restrictions too encompass physical and social isolation in cramped living spaces, as well as exclusion from the public sphere. In this contribution, through my engagement with the Foucauldian concept of the ‘political dream’ in a plague-stricken town, I put forth an account of ‘invasion’ as an audacious act of trespassing boundaries, particularly the transgression of citizens’ privacy during lockdowns. This concept of invasion, I argue, entwined with and starkly juxtaposed against the passive ‘non-invasion’ of DV victims in the guise of marital privacy rhetoric, leaves DV victims in a significantly more precarious position in the global epidemic. Unsettling the rigidity of the private/public; personal/political boundaries, Chinese feminists launched ‘Anti-Domestic Violence, Little Vaccine’ campaign during the Wuhan lockdown. It is in my examination of their performative intervention that I propose my second account of ‘invasion’ – invasion as trespassing a prior boundaries. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s feminist critique of the Habermasian public sphere theory, I delineate that the AVLV campaign is an act of invasion performed on the edges of the fixed spatial, political and legal boundaries, thereby blurring these pre-established lines.

Four centuries after the outbreak of the bubonic plague in Europe, the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe in 2020 and is still lingering three years later. If the turn of the eighteenth century saw quarantine – ‘meticulous spatial partitioning’, surveillance and disciplinary regulations – becoming the major model of control and governance of a plague town (Foucault 2003: 45), the COVID-19 pandemic witnessed the exercise of this model to the fullest. For Foucault, the disciplinary mechanism exercised over citizens’ bodies and the suspension of laws was a political dream coming true (2003: 47; 1995: 197–8). A political dream is what rulers dreamt: a ‘utopia of the perfectly governed city’ where surveillance, compartmentalization and discipline penetrated the smallest unit of each individual body (1995: 198). Such a dream came true when the collective bodies of individuals were divided, purged, disciplined, under close surveillance and subordinated to biopolitics. As much as the quarantine model remains arguably relevant today during a global pandemic that is still ongoing, so too does the political dream.

COVID-19 AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

Related to yet different from the Foucauldian concept, the political dream in Wuhan (the centre of the epidemic in early 2020) unfolded in a much more complicated manner. Wuhan, a megacity with approximately eleven million residents, went into a full lockdown from 20 January to 8 April 2020 as coronavirus surged. The lockdown amplified social inequalities in an unprecedented way due to the complete abolition of public space, self-isolation behind doors, economic insecurity and stress. Disadvantaged groups living in the supposedly bustling public space during the pandemic found nowhere private to stay. Paradoxically, victims of domestic violence (DV) – mostly women and children – found themselves unable to leave (Wake and Kandula 2022). The rise of DV cases globally during the COVID-19 pandemic has been identified by scholars as a double crisis (Sharma and Borah 2020). The United Nations’ Women’s ‘The Shadow Pandemic Campaign’ called for public attention to the increasing DV cases, a shadow pandemic.¹ A review of DV studies since September 2021 notes that globally ‘the increased risk of DV has been related to measures conducted by governments to control COVID-19’ (Wake and Kandula 2022: 5). Virus containment measures such as lockdowns resulted in greater financial insecurity, depression and more frequent close contact with abusers in enclosed spaces, which significantly increased the risk of violence against women. Even worse, COVID-19-related restrictions such as ‘stay-at-home orders’ ‘significantly inhibited victims’ ability to reach out for aid’ (7). In China, regional reports of DV have increased dramatically since the pandemic began. The number of domestic violence complaints received by the local police in Jianli, a rural county in Hubei Province close to Wuhan, ‘doubled in January 2020 in comparison to January 2019’ (Zhang 2020: 735).

Never has the spatial politics of DV, I argue, been made more explicit than in the COVID-19 lockdown. The spatial-political nature intrinsic to pandemic measures – ‘isolating inclusion within society, whether in the home or in hospital’ (Twitchin 2022: 76); the inaccessibility of public space and public life – precisely mirrored and reinforced the spatial logic of DV – isolating inclusion in patriarchal domestic institutions; exclusion from public, political and legal support. Scholars argue that stay-at-home orders ‘mimic common forms of abuse’, such as mobility restrictions and isolation (Sower and Alexander 2021: 154). Self-isolation of individual bodies, social distancing measures, travel bans and surveillance over practices of spatial invasion constitute a Foucauldian political dream, an ideal ‘exercise of disciplinary power’ (Foucault 1995: 198). In the political dream, each individual citizen confined to the private was reduced to what Agamben describes as ‘a purely biological state’ without any social or political dimension (2021: 26). Likewise, long before the coronavirus hit, abused women in China had been excluded from official public, political and legal debates by being either engulfed in discourses of domestic privacy or being informally mediated to preserve the integrity of domestic institutions that tolerate and reproduce such gender-based violence. After the COVID-19 restrictions were implemented, the impasse of abused women in China was made even more strikingly visible in explicitly spatial and literal physical terms. Victims shared the spatial-legal hindrances facing them, compounded by the spatial fragmentation produced by the lockdown.² One victim’s ordeal began when she managed to break free from her abusive boyfriend in their apartment, encountering a series of obstacles. She had to undergo a temperature check by a security guard as she left the apartment complex, which added to her fear and anxiety. Her initial attempt to report the incident was disheartening as the police officer dismissed DV as a minor concern. Her subsequent visit to another police station failed again due to the lack of injury reports. Acquiring the necessary reports at the hospital, despite the risk of COVID-19 infection, proved to be a challenge, as an injury assessment would have to wait until after a COVID-19 test, compounded by the irritating fact that all the nearby printing shops had shut down. The victim’s short stay in the hospital was tracked by the residents’ committee in charge of the COVID-19 regulations, followed by a request for another COVID-19 test. Following multiple visits to the police station, the legitimacy of her reports was challenged by the officer, as well as her ‘indecision’ about leaving the abusive relationship.

INVASION AS ‘TRESPASSING’ BOUNDARIES

The victim’s voluntary and brave exposure of her bodily and psychic trauma in the digital public sphere unpacked how COVID-19-induced physical/spatial barriers intersected with gendered spatial hierarchy in DV police practices particularly during the lockdown. A feminist analysis of this intersection reveals that ‘the public/private binary’ is ‘one of the sites in which the structures of gender and space overlap’ (Parvathi 2021: 36). The police’s bureaucratic neglect and blatant unresponsiveness driven by patriarchal normalization of DV was further amplified by the COVID-19 spatial landscape (closure of public spaces) and regulations (biopolitical testing and tracking of personal data). Putting individual privacy at risk, I argue, biopolitical surveillance over citizens’ bodies constitutes a frequent reality of people’s lockdown life – ‘invasion’.

Understood as ‘trespassing boundaries’, this invasion specifically refers to a reality of constant ‘transgression of privacy’ of citizens during the lockdown. With the assistance of biopolitical technologies, the residents’ committee that embodied the COVID-19 rules reduced complicated socio-demographic groups into a COVID-19-defined one: positive suspects; positive bodies or negative bodies. It is in this context that the public sharing of a DV victim made clear a paradox: the reluctant interference in marital or heterosexual intimate relationship privacy and the active invasion of COVID-19-endowed disciplinary power, ruled by the state and practised by the residents’ committee, into each citizen’s private life.

I argue that it is exactly this complicity of the passive non-‘invasion’ of the marital/intimate privacy and the active invasion of citizens’ privacy that contributed to the further disempowerment of abused women during the pandemic. Feminist law scholar Elizabeth Schneider points out the violence of privacy rhetoric as a ‘key ideological rationale’ for the state’s ‘selective application of law’ and ‘refusal to intervene to protect battered women within ongoing intimate relationships’ (1994: 36). In such a dilemma, a DV victim found herself stuck between two roles: a non-legally admitted woman in a domestic sphere immune from the state’s protection and a citizen whose privacy has been under absolute invasion. In the latter, each individual citizen was defined as an ungendered body – the smallest unit of a plague town – into which the executive power penetrates in order to ensure a disciplinary spatial governance of population during COVID-19 surges. Each was tracked, tested and documented. As a result of the complicity between the ‘invasion’ and the ‘non-invasion’, DV victims found themselves in a particularly precarious position. Aiming to bring DV into the public realm, Chinese feminists involved in anti-domestic violence (ADV) activism have long been engaging in demystifying the gendered spatial politics underpinning the violence of privacy.

FEMINIST INVASION AS ‘TRESPASSING’ A PRIORI BOUNDARIES

One month after the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, individual feminist activists in China responded to the threats the pandemic posed specifically to women: DV, greater risk of unemployment and disproportionate responsibility for caregiving (Guo 2020: 69). On 1 March 2020, together with the Rural Women Development Foundation (RWDF) Guangdong,³ Guo Jing, a feminist social worker based in Wuhan, and her feminist friends launched ‘#Anti-Domestic Violence, Little Vaccine’ (AVLV) campaign on Weibo (18–19). As a woman who won China’s first lawsuit concerning gender discrimination in employment (Bao 2020: 54), Guo has always been committed to feminism. In her published The Diary of the Wuhan Lockdown (Wuhan Fengcheng Riji) (2020), Guo documented in detail how AVLV came into being. Since the start of the lockdown, she has been openly sharing her private WeChat account and posting diaries, hoping to create a deeper bond with people in times of self-isolation. She uncovered the lack of legal aid and peer support for battered women and challenged gendered division of space and labour during the lockdown – women shouldering disproportionate care taking at home (Guo 2020: 34, 76); more men going out for walks than women (76); female frontline workers’ needs being ignored (163). Guo was also involved in discussions with her feminist friends about the impasse of domestically abused women and decided to take actions together. In late February 2020, she invited Feng Yuan, a leading Chinese feminist activist, scholar and a founding member of the Anti-Domestic Violence Network in China⁴ to an anti-domestic violence (ADV) online workshop organized by her that attracted more than 1,000 participants (Bao 2020: 56). As a continuation of the awareness-raising, the AVLV campaign was born a few days after.

Guo’s writing and sharing of hardship, hopelessness and feminist insights informed by the pandemic for connections beyond four walls is a feminist ‘situated writing’ proposed by feminist theorists Maria Tamboukou and Mona Livholts (Tamboukou and Livholts 2015; Livholts 2019), referring to ‘narrative life writing genres’ – diary, fiction and theatre – through which the embodied knowledge of living a feminist life/feminist situation is narrated, theorized and addressed to a group of readers (Livholts 2019: 21). Through autobiographical diary writing, Guo articulated her situated knowledge – the everyday-ness of lockdown life as a female citizen and an activist with sharp feminist lenses. Like Guo, many women using the #AVLV Weibo hashtags shared their personal sufferings of DV during the lockdown. In this sense, Chinese feminist activism amid the COVID-19 pandemic aligns well with the widely known tenet of second-wave feminism – ‘the personal is the political’ – featuring ‘consciousness-raising’ and ‘public speak outs’. It is precisely in the spatial (and political) dimension of the two dichotomies – ‘private/public’; ‘personal/political’ in AVLV – that I propose the second account of ‘invasion’.

My understanding of ‘invasion’ is informed by feminist public sphere theory. Feminist in the sense that the boundaries being trespassed are a priori, pre-given and self-evident. Such invasion therefore has the potential to problematize each of the following two spatial categorizations: ‘private/public’; ‘personal/political’. This account of ‘invasion’ is highly situated in my analysis of Chinese ADV activism. Feminist bodies involved in such activism spilled across the aforementioned boundaries, requesting public, legal and political interventions against DV. These bodies breaking out of the personal/political zones echo what feminist public sphere scholar Nancy Fraser suggests: terms such as ‘the domestic’ and ‘the political’ shall be treated as ‘cultural classifications and rhetorical labels’, rather than ‘simply straightforward designation of societal spheres’ (1997: 88). Fraser continues, ‘they are powerful terms that are frequently deployed to delegitimate some interests, views, and topics and valorize others’ (ibid.). Given the non-intrinsic, or performative nature of the terms, their bifurcation therefore is ‘not simply fixed’, but being thrown into constant contestations between ‘official-political’ – what is supported by state and its instruments of law and ‘not contested by the public’, and ‘discursive political’ or ‘politicised’ – ‘what is contested only by and within relatively specialised, enclaved, and/or segmented publics’. One such public consists of Chinese feminists involved in the ADV activism. Their feminist projects, borrowing from Fraser, politicized ‘discursive privatisation’ that supports ‘the private power’ of ‘husbands over wives’ (116).

‘Invasion’, understood as feminists unsettling the fixedness of and redrawing the line between domestic and political spheres, is not arguably new to Chinese ADV activism. Aiming to propose DV legislation, activism as such has emerged since the early 2010s, evidenced by ‘Bloody Brides’ (2012), an ADV street performance and ‘Nude Bodies for Anti-Domestic Violence’ (2012), a digital feminist campaign (Wang 2018: 151). Performing traumatic and nude female bodies – personal and private – these two campaigns brought DV, a discursively private matter, to the official-political realm, evoked public discussions and facilitated the passing of the first ADV Law (hereafter, the Law) in China in 2015 and its subsequent enforcement on 1 March 2016. Feminist scholar Hou writes, ‘Chinese feminists successfully politicised the personal issues of DV for legislative changes’ (2020: 348).

Yet such feminist triumph – insistence on legal-institutional interventions in DV and politicization of the personal sufferings – later proved to be less so at the judicial and policing level. Post-Law practices often deploy ‘the informal and flexible mechanism of judicial mediation’ in most DV cases (Jiang 2019: 228). Being ‘incorporated into’ the political narratives of ‘maintaining social harmony’ underpinned by marital/familial stability, mediation infamously characterizes normalization of DV, victim-shaming, restoration of broken marital relationships, reluctant issuance of personal protection orders and lack of support for divorce litigation (228, 237). Availing of these patriarchal norms and narratives, mediation is a tool to protect, at the expense of DV victims’ rights and safety, patriarchal familial structures or relationships where gender dominance and subordination is reproduced. Despite the legal reform, judicial mediation in Chinese DV cases is a continuation of ‘male-supremacist constructions of [categories of public and private]’, which ‘enshrine gender hierarchy by privatizing practices of domination like sexual harassment’, marital rape and DV (Fraser 1997: 115).

So far, the spatial-political dynamics in Chinese DV activism has been made clear: the pre-Law phase witnessed feminists’ problematization of the exclusion of DV from the legal realm as a way to delegitimize women’s interests; the post-Law stage saw public power being finally practised in egregiously ‘private’ DV cases, yet only to regulate DV to ensure the public governance of battered women and their subordination to men in domestic institutions and ultimately consolidate the private nature of DV. My brief review of Chinese DV activism reveals that ‘the public/political’ (the state and the law) and ‘private/personal’ (DV and battered women) have never been simply separated, rather, the former always has more power and instruments to draw and redraw the line between these categories. The shifting spatial and power dynamics of DV activism and legislation poses a challenge to Chinese feminist activists: how to keep initiating changes beyond the legal system? Borrowing from Fraser, I argue that the feminist project is not to

collapse the boundaries between public and private. Rather, feminist analysis shows the political, ideological, gender-coded character of these categories. And the feminist project aims in part to overcome the gender hierarchy that gives men more power than women to draw the line between public and private. (Fraser 1997: 115)

Fraser points out what is at stake is precisely who has more power to draw the line. Given the political apathy towards and legal inefficiency in DV cases, this question should be consistently raised by Chinese feminist activists as a reminder of the gendered hierarchy in DV and the judicial system, made only visible through a feminist spatial-political analysis or activist project. AVLV, the focus of the following section, is one such feminist project.

THE #AVLV CAMPAIGN

AVLV began with Weibo hashtags such as #Anti-DomesticViolence, LittleVaccine and #Anti-dom esticViolenceDuringCOVID-19.⁵ These hashtags created a digital space for feminist-situated writing, storytelling and sharing: DV victims documented their stories to seek help and peer support; activists challenged dominating discourses of victim-blaming and offered remote counselling services. This feminist solidarity with battered women through hashtags intended to increase public awareness of COVID-19-related and intensified domestic violence. As documented in Guo’s diary on 4 March 2020, ‘the aim of the campaign [AVLV] is to make domestic violence visible and make its victims feel supported’ (Bao 2020: 57). Mobilizing pandemic-related symbols, activists’ design of the slogan and poster of the AVLV campaign stressed the strong link between COVID-19 and the rise of domestic violence cases (fig. 1). The slogan on the left-hand side reads ‘anti–domestic violence, little vaccine’ (fanjiabao xiaoyimiao) and, on the right side, ‘taking care of each other during the lockdown’ (fengsuozhong shouhu bici); in the middle, a cat with a mask holding a vaccine syringe with one paw, while another trying to inject the vaccine and a piece of green leaf appears at the tip of the needle.

Figure 1. Poster of the ‘Anti–domestic Violence, Little Vaccine’ Campaign. Created by the Rural Women Development Foundation (RWDF) Guangdong and AVLV activists.

These digital feminist discourses have the potential to provoke material changes in physical space. Initially taking shape in the digital space, AVLV’s online presence navigated offline participation of congregated bodies. Activists addressed potential participants with an open letter titled ‘Open Call for ‘Anti-Domestic Violence, Little Vaccine Initiative’ (fanjiabao xiaoyimiao changyishu), which highlighted the correlation between isolation and the increase in domestic violence.⁶ The Weibo post translated as: ‘During the lockdown, women have been confined in the domestic space with abusers. This confinement makes it difficult for authorities and NGOs [non-governmental organizations] to intervene, causing a drastic rise in domestic violence cases. They need our help!’ After the opening line, activists continued to list detailed tactics for both online and offline activism. They begin with a prerequisite for participation: ‘No abuser is welcome to join the campaign.’ The second is a guide for offline intervention in domestic abuse: ‘When you witness or overhear an abuse, please assist and report immediately to the police, local authorities or the All-China Women’s Federation (a governmental organisation in charge of women’s issues in China) who, according to the “Domestic Violence Law”, should intervene.’ The third offers further guidance for offline participation and a highly relevant one to this research: ‘Please post the open letter, printed or handwritten, in your own neighbourhood.’ Mobilizing thousands of participants in digital space (Bao 2020: 57), this hashtag feminist activism eventually evoked substantial material changes in the physical space.

EMBODYING ‘FEMINIST INVASION’: ADV ON THE EDGES

Navigated by hashtags such as #AVLV, participants across the nation went outdoors to the apartment complexes or neighbourhoods of their own, the only public space accessible to them during the lockdown, and placed their own handwritten ‘Call to Action’ on walls or in elevators.⁷ The quasi-public space situated on the borderline between the strictly private space and the well-disciplined public space was reconfigured by activists for a ‘politically constituted collectivity’ (Fraser 2013: 73) – making space beyond four walls for ADV activism. Collectively, activists reclaimed their residential compounds for their own use. Their corporeal movements embody what I analysed earlier: ‘feminist invasion’ – bodies trespassing spatial boundaries, acting on the edges that separate the strictly regulated private and public spheres, problematizing the pre-given spatial demarcation and ultimately redrawing, although only limitedly, the lines between ‘what is private’ and ‘what is public’. Additionally, each feminist bodily movement also extended the political dimension of their own lives in Agamben’s sense when contraction of public life had become the norm. In Guo’s diary, she questioned the very nature of public space in China – one that rejects practices of citizenship and ‘tolerates and encourages violence against women’ (Bao 2020: 61). Public space scholar Vikas Mehta (2020) argues that, during the pandemic, ‘the repurposing of residential streets, sidewalks, parking lots, and other modest public spaces in neighbourhoods shows an expansion of public space and sociability’ and this expansion ‘is also that of agency’ (18–19). In this sense, feminist bodily movements renegotiating the spatial boundaries was indeed an exercise of citizens’ agency, and so was their collective resistance against domestic violence during the lockdown.

In this essay, I offer new accounts of the concept of ‘invasion’, generally understood as ‘trespassing spatial boundaries’. From my analysis of the spatial-political logic of the COVID-19 lockdown, I propose an understanding of ‘invasion’ as trespassing of one’s privacy, aided by biopolitical regulations. Further, my second account of ‘invasion’ – ‘public, legal and political intervention into the private sphere’ – is rooted in my feminist analysis of gendered spatial hierarchy in DV, Chinese DV legislation and police practices. More importantly, I complicated these two definitions of ‘invasion’ by pinpointing their complicity in DV cases during the lockdown: the complicity of active invasion of one’s privacy and reluctant invasion into DV further disempowered battered women. Lastly, by examining the Chinese ADV activism and the AVLV campaign, I provide a feminist perspective of ‘invasion’: ‘feminist invasion’ as crossing pre-given spatial boundaries, problematizing and redrawing the lines between spatial dichotomies such as ‘private/public’ and ‘personal/political’.

Notes

1 For the press release of the UN Woman’s Shadow Pandemic public awareness campaign, see UN Women (2020).

2 For the news report on DV cases in China during the COVID-19 pandemic, see Southern Weekly (2020).

3 Rural Women Development Foundation Guangdong (guangdongsheng lvya funv fazhan jijinhui) is a private development foundation established in 2013 and dedicated to the development of rural women and children in China.

4 For details of Feng Yuan’s ADV endeavour, see China Development Brief interview (2020).

5 Hashtag #Anti-Domestic Violence, Little Vaccine (fanjiabao, xiaoyimiao) with about 800,000 views and 704 discussions https://shorturl.at/agCHT, Hashtag #Anti-domestic Violence during Covid-19 (yiqing fanjiabao) with almost 40,000,000 views and 20,000 discussions https://shorturl.at/amBN9, accessed 21 September 2023.

6 For the Weibo post of #AVLV campaign and the open letter, see Rural Women Development Foundation Guangdong’s Open Call (2020).

7 For details of the AVLV participation and the footage of participants’ practices in their own neighbourhoods, see a video created by AVLV activists (2020).