Growing intimate privatepublics: everyday utopia in the naturecultures of a young lesbian and bisexual women’s allotment
Issue Date
2014-11-19Subjects
allotmentsbisexual
everyday utopia
gardening
lesbian
naturecultures
privatepublics
queer
young women
Subject Categories::F810 Environmental Geography
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The Young Women’s Group in Manchester is a ‘young women’s peer health project, run by and for young lesbian and bisexual women’, which runs an allotment as one of its activities. At a time when interest in allotments and gardening appears to be on the increase, the existence of yet another community allotment may seem unremarkable. Yet we suggest that this queer allotment poses challenges for conventional theorisations of allotments, as well as for understandings of public and private. In this article we explore how the allotment project might be understood to be intensely engaged in ‘growing intimate publics’, or what we term ‘privatepublics’. These are paradoxical intimacies, privatepublic spaces which are not necessarily made possible in the usual private sphere of domestic homes. Here we focus on the work involved in materialising the allotment, which we understand as a queer privatepublic ‘natureculture’ (Haraway, 2008) which appears as an ‘everyday utopia’ (Cooper, 2014).Citation
Moore N, Church A, Gabb J, Holmes C, Lee A, Ravenscroft N (2014) 'Growing intimate privatepublics: everyday utopia in the naturecultures of a young lesbian and bisexual women’s allotment', Feminist Theory, 15 (3), pp.327-343 .Publisher
Sage PublicationsJournal
Feminist TheoryAdditional Links
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1464700114545324Type
ArticleLanguage
enISSN
1464-7001EISSN
1741-2773Sponsors
This research was supported by grants from the Connected Communities Programme, led by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/1507612/1, AH/I507655/1).ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1177/1464700114545324
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