On gardens of the Anthropocene: gendered violence, colonial legal enclosures, and feminist posthuman kinship
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article invokes Rick Barot’s poem On Gardens to trace the interrelations of gendered violence and colonial legal enclosures in the Anthropocene, ultimately proposing a radical jurisprudence of gardens. Drawing on posthumanist feminist, eco-feminist, and decolonial feminist theories, I employ écriture féminine alongside autoethnography to work through these interrelations. Written in the personal voice, I offer a narrative woven through empathy, desire, and wonder. I begin by reflecting on my own heritage and its intersections with the questions provoked by Barot’s poem. I then move to theorize the garden as a space for the human yearning for innocence, but also as a site of colonial and gendered violence, human care, and the cycles of life, death, and rebirth. This reveals how gardens – and law – serve as a placeholder both of violence and for new possibilities. Moving between theory and lived experience, I use On Gardens to bring forth my own journey through the intersections of law, gardens, gendered and academic life, highlighting the violence embedded in these spaces. I bring this to bear on the radical jurisprudence of gardens which the article proposes. In the concluding section, I celebrate the joys of posthuman feminist transversal kinship, envisioning and embodying a transformative way of living, writing, and becoming in the Anthropocene. The article invites readers to reconsider gardens as sites of an intra- and inter-species radical jurisprudence of care, resistance, and renewal in the face of contemporary challenges of the Anthropocene.
Author: Matilda Arvidsson
Institution: University of Gothenburg
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4407405340