Dismantling Displacement and Dispossession – A Feminist Legal Geography Perspective on the Housing Crisis & Eviction Court Cases

Keywords: Housing Crisis, Evictions, Feminist Legal Geography, Displacement, Disposession
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper draws attention to the multiple dimensions on how the housing crisis, poverty and profit unfold differently in day-to-day negotiations, observed and analyzed in district courts in Germany. Grounded in a feminist spatial perspective, this paper argues that class, gender and race, as always, play not only a major role in the case’s outcome on the eviction at stake, but also render the way, who gets listened to and heard and who not. By shifting the attention from three scenes of hope and loss and by turning these observations into a feminist analysis of the housing crisis in general, the paper highlights the centrality of ‘home’, without which nothing else is possible, but which, nevertheless, remains too often the downside of profit and poverty.