Subsiding sediments, gender, and obstinate repairs in the coastal city

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Several scholars have convincingly proposed understanding processes of subsidence and tidal flooding as questions of environmental justice: they form part of a politics of uneven urbanization, with those most responsible for causing subsidence suffering least from its effects and being the first to be protected by public flood management projects, at the expense of many others. This article suggests a feminist-inspired expansion of these analyses. By ethnographically documenting the continuous acts of repair that those residing in unstable and flood-damaged coastal neighborhoods need to engage in to continue to be able to live in these places, we shed light on the micro-politics of water and sediments in subsiding areas. In our study area in Semarang in Indonesia, such repairs are often carried out by women, with the PKK, a semi-governmental organization of (house-)wives, assuming an important role in coordinating them. By emphatically constructing the care for bodies and houses as part of what it takes to be (seen as) a good woman, the PKK situates essential responsibilities for maintaining coastal neighborhoods live-able in the private domain. This not only categorizes those involved in repairs as undeserving of economic recognition (a wage) but also absolves the state of its duties to look after the health and wellbeing of its citizens. In the process, a specific ideal of woman- and wife-hood is enacted. This ideal helps to cheaply enroll women's labor into the state capitalist and developmentalist project. We conclude that in a landscape increasingly degraded by state-promoted processes of uneven urbanization, not only the responsibilities of causing land subsidence, but also the efforts to repair its impacts are unevenly distributed. Those engaging in acts of maintenance and repair are not merely surviving, complying with state directives, or diligently fulfilling their duties as good citizens. Through their care for bodies and houses, they also (re-)craft endangered attachments and connections to places and neighbors. Repairing, then, also expresses their desire to stay and, in this sense, forms part of subtle strategies of circumventing, obstructing, and resisting state projects of industrialization and urbanization that hinge on relocation.