Alimentary Politics and Gendered Power in Easterine Kire's A Terrible Matriarchy

This paper is a close literary and socio-cultural analysis of food, hunger, and power in Easterine Kire's A Terrible Matriarchy (2013). It explores how alimentary practices such as the preparation of food, its distribution, withholding, and symbolism function as a mode of domination within the domestic sphere of Angami Naga society. Drawing upon feminist food studies, postcolonial theory, and Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus and social capital, the paper argues that Kire deploys the politics of the kitchen and dining not merely as indigenous cultural backdrop but also as the very site where patriarchal authority is conceived, reproduced, internalized, and enforced—paradoxically by women themselves. The central irony of the novel is that the household, which is run by a "grandmother," constitutes a "terrible matriarchy" and is shown to rest fundamentally on economies of hunger: who gets to eat first, who receives the big pieces of meat, and who labors to feed others while depriving herself. The protagonist Dielieno's navigation of this hierarchy reflects how food scarcity or abundance are not merely material conditions but also mechanisms of gender formation in a deeply biased and unequal society. By placing Kire's text in dialogue with theories of culinary capital and nutritional inequality, this paper attempts to examine food in A Terrible Matriarchy as a simultaneous weapon of control, a site of resistance, and an embodiment of indigenous women's subjectivity.