Reassessing (en)gendered responsibilities for care through community gardening in Aotearoa New Zealand

Community gardens are imbricated with power dynamics, indicating how these places can prompt reflections on constructed social norms and structures. Working with three gardens in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, I employed a qualitative mix-methods approach, informed by phenomenology, to explore the embodied experiences of women and their reflections on gender roles and performativity in these spaces. Adopting a feminist approach to agency and structure, I discuss the non-linear (and sometimes contradictory) ways in which six of the participants negotiate roles in and beyond the gardens, with a focus on responsibilities for care. The diverse strategies that these participants found to increase their resilience in the face of the socially constructed imaginaries around gender stereotypes and unpaid caregiving work indicate that the gardens are complex and simultaneous meeting places. Nevertheless, their experiences are processual, subtle, and permeated by a certain complicity with correlated oppressive structures. Acknowledging the limitations of their actions in fostering a transformative agenda towards intersectional justice, I argue that the relationships developed with/in these gardens have still increased some participants' agency to deal with challenges posed by patriarchal structures. I conclude the paper emphasising the relevance of community gardens in being a public space for these women release themselves from some patriarchal constrains, and for a critical assessment of care, not as a gendered and individual responsibility, but as a shared ethical imperative.