Leaving Home: Safer Spaces Beyond the Neoliberal Family

The instruction to #StayHomeStaySafe during the Covid crisis was for many women and girls as much a threat to life as the virus itself. Domestic violence not only escalated during lockdown but the routes to safety that many had come to rely on were no longer available. This chapter argues that the rupture created by Covid-19 offers a space in which we can radically re-evaluate how we understand the relationship between gender, violence and concepts like ‘home’ and ‘family’. Taking a critical posthumanist approach, Debra Benita Shaw proposes that we need to take into account the symbiotic relationship between bodies and architecture and how the objects that we interact with in everyday life enable a perpetuation of ontological ideals. In this way, she suggests, we can begin to formulate a radical critique of the social structures that make a place for gender based violence to exist.