‘Trapped in safety’: Carceral domesticity and the gendered geographies of Rohingya refugee women in urban Malaysia

This article examines the lived experiences of Rohingya refugee women in Malaysia's urban shantytowns, drawing on long-term feminist ethnographic fieldwork in Kuala Lumpur. It argues that statelessness, gender, and urban informality converge to produce two distinct spatial conditions: gendered containment, through which women's mobility is disciplined by the threat of arrest rather than social sanction alone; and carceral domesticity, through which the home becomes not merely a site of patriarchal control but a space structurally produced by state enforcement. Extending recent feminist geography scholarship on carceral domesticity to the specific condition of urban statelessness, the article shows how domesticity and incarceration become, in practice, the same condition for women whose legal non-existence renders movement through public space a criminal risk. At the same time, Rohingya refugee women's everyday practices of care, solidarity, and collective memory transform these spaces of confinement into sites of resistance and community. The article contributes to feminist geography, critical refugee studies, and scholarship on gendered statelessness beyond formal camp settings.