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

Scholars have convincingly proposed understanding processes of tidal flooding and subsidence 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 of residents living in flood-damaged neighborhoods, 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 state-initiated organization of (house)wives, assuming an important role in coordinating them. By emphatically constructing 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 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 or diligently fulfilling their duties as good citizens. Repairing homes and bodies, we argue, 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.