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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Kausiki Sarma
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
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.
Author(s): Sarma K, Hu Y
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Gender & Society
Year: 2025
Volume: 39
Issue: 5
Pages: 717-747
Print publication date: 01/10/2025
Online publication date: 15/09/2025
Acceptance date: 29/07/2025
Date deposited: 16/09/2025
ISSN (print): 0891-2432
ISSN (electronic): 1552-3977
Publisher: Sage
URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/08912432251374244
DOI: 10.1177/08912432251374
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