Staying with the Sodomy at Prospect Cottage: Derek Jarman and Nature’s Queer Negativity

This chapter discusses contemporary representations of Derek Jarman’s garden and the interpretative tendency towards reparative logics, or what Leo Bersani calls the ‘culture of redemption’. Following theorists concerned with the relation between queer ecology and anti-social queer theory, it goes on to explore the negative aspects of Jarman’s garden through the notion of ‘nature as pharmakon’. It ends by suggesting that Jarman’s garden resists a simply reparative or negative interpretation, and instead can be understood to embody a sodomitical logic, which shatters theoretical certainty.