ABSTRACT
This chapter, the authors approach the concept of gender and its relationship to law from the perspective of 'southern theory'. Working from this standpoint, they will introduce three themes: gendered contestation over land; the gendered politics of hunger; and the social analysis of terror and queer subjectivities. In an important collection of Aboriginal writings in Australia, called Our Land is Our Life, Marcia Langton argues that in the face of colonial violence, women's system of law and older women's ties to place were crucial to community survival. Carter argues that, as such, the duties of Indigenous women as kin-persons, wives, or mothers become incomprehensible under the settler-colonial system without reference to law and legal categories. The combination of a 'southern theory' perspective with an intersectional gender analysis reveals how law shapes land rights; controls access to food for women; and configures terror, especial in the interactions of the Global South with the North.
