Dr Matilda Arvidsson

This article, out in Open Access with the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, is part of a special issue with Jane Bennett and William Connolly, on ”New materialist reflections for the Anthropocene”.

My 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.
Access the article, in Open Access here.