Forest as a specific place for girls and their green criticism

Abstract

This paper explores what a forest as a specific place means and does for girls, while it scrutinises how to understand place and how to consider place methodologically. The girls, called ‘forest daughters’ here, write letters to the female President of Finland. The letters portray a forest as a lived ‘place-world’ that ties place and self together. The multiplicity of these relations is methodologically displayed as an assemblage of ‘girl–place–letter’ and conjoined a perspective of the ‘where of research’. The paper argues that place and self help construct and activate each other. A forest is a site of pleasures and possibilities and in the letters, it turns out that a forest becomes a stage and practice of power that develops environmental activism and gives rise to utterances of green criticism. To develop and exemplify this discussion, I examine a letter to the president written by one of these young forest daughters.