Indigenous Feminist Legal Theory

In: Canadian journal of women and the law: Revue juridique "La femme et le droit", Band 26, Heft 2, S. 365-401

Abstract

This article considers the necessity of critical gender analyses of indigenous laws. "Gender neutral" approaches dominate in the field of indigenous law, ignoring the gendered realities of indigenous laws and also the gendered aspects of theorizing. There is a need to develop theoretical frameworks that explicitly address these problems, and, thus, in this article I articulate Indigenous feminist legal theory. This theory is an analytic tool for examining Indigenous laws as gendered. I build this theory by bringing three bodies of work together, which are presently speaking past one another—feminist legal theory, Indigenous feminist theory, and Indigenous legal theory. Indigenous feminist legal theory generates an intersectional, multi-juridical, anti-colonial, anti-essentialist reading of law that is crucial to a multitude of fields.