Subversive Property : Law and the Production of Spaces of Belonging

Property tends to operate and to be understood as a conservative social force, but can property also be subversive? This book explores the relationship between space, subjectivity and property, in order to invert conventional socio-legal understandings of property that revolve around possession and to theorize property in terms of belonging. Drawing on feminist and critical race theory, the book shifts the focus away from the propertied subject and onto the broader spaces in which the propertied subject is located. Thinking about property in terms of space and belonging reveals new political possibilities for property. And the theory of property as a spatially contingent relation of belonging proposed in this book not only offers a conceptually useful way of analysing a wide range of socio-legal issues, it enables new connections to be drawn between them.

This book explores the relationship between space, subjectivity and property in order to invert conventional socio-legal understandings of property. Sarah Keenan demonstrates that new political possibilities for property may be unveiled by thinking about property in terms of space and belonging, rather than exclusion.

Drawing on feminist and critical race theory, this book shifts focus away from the propertied subject and on to the broader spaces in and through which the propertied subject is located. Using case studies, such as analyses of compulsory leases under Australia’s Northern Territory Intervention and lesbian asylum cases from a range of jurisdictions, Keenan argues that these spaces consist of networks of relations that revolve around belonging: not just belonging between subject and object, as property is traditionally understood, but also the less explored relation of belonging between the part and the whole.

This book therefore offers a conceptually useful way of analysing a wide range of socio-legal issues. It will be of relevance to those working in the area of property and legal geography, but also to those with more general interests in socio-legal studies, social and political theory, postcolonial studies, critical race studies and gender and sexuality studies.