Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love - by Lida Maxwell (Hardcover)

About the Book

" Reading Silent Spring as an outgrowth of Rachel Carson's love with Dorothy Freeman, Maxwell argues for the power of queer love now in the fight against climate change. There is something major missing from most accounts of Silent Spring and its impact: namely, Dorothy Freeman, with whom Rachel Carson had a love relationship for over a decade. Freeman had a summer house with her husband, Stan, on the island of Southport, Maine, where Carson settled after the success of her first bestseller, The Sea Around Us . Correspondence shows the women developing strong feelings as they connect over their shared pleasure in the rocky coast. In this moving new book, political theorist Lida Maxwell offers close readings that suggest Carson's relationship with Freeman was central to her writing of Silent Spring -a work whose defense of vibrant nonhuman nature allowed Carson and Freeman's love to flourish and for the pair to become their most authentic selves. What Maxwell calls Carson and Freeman's "queer love" unsettled their heteronormative ideas of the good life as based in bourgeois private life, and led Carson to an increasingly critical view of capitalism and its effects on nonhuman nature and human lives alike. From these women's experience Maxwell compellingly makes the case for an alternative democratic climate politics based on learning how to tune into authentic desire. Read through this lens, Carson's work begins to look different and shows us not that the human incursion into nature is dangerous, but that a particular relationship is: the loveless using up of nature for capitalism. When Carson and Freeman correspond in excited detail about the algae, anemones, and veery thrushes of the Maine coast, they give us a glimpse of a different, more loving use of nature. Inspired by Carson and Freeman's deep care for one another, Maxwell reveals how a form of loving available to all of us can help reshape political desire amidst contemporary environmental crises"--

Book Synopsis

How Silent Spring stands as a monument to a unique, loving relationship between Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, and how such love underpins a new environmental politics

After the success of her first bestseller, The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson settled in Southport, Maine. The married couple Dorothy and Stanley Freeman had a cottage nearby, and the trio quickly became friends. Their extensive and evocative correspondence shows that Dorothy and Rachel did something more: they fell in love.

In this moving new book, Lida Maxwell explores their letters to reveal how Carson's masterpiece, Silent Spring, grew from the love these women shared for their wild surroundings and, vitally and increasingly, for each other. Carson had already demonstrated a profound environmental awareness by the time she purchased her home in Maine; Maxwell proposes that it took her love for Dorothy to open up a more powerful space for critique. As their love unsettled their heteronormative ideas of bourgeois life, it enabled Carson to develop an increasingly critical view of capitalism and its effects on nonhuman nature and human lives alike, and it was this evolution that made the advocacy of Silent Spring possible.

In Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love, Silent Spring's exposé of the dangerous and loveless exhaustion of nature for capitalism's ends is set in bold relief against the lovers' correspondence, in which we see the path toward a more loving use of nature and a transformative political desire that, Maxwell argues, should inform our approach to contemporary environmental crises.

Review Quotes

"Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love promotes harmony with nature through an impassioned fusion of biography, cultural critique, and environmental advocacy."--Rebecca Foster, Foreword Reviews

"In this stirring, often revelatory account of Rachel Carson's queer relationship with Dorothy Freeman, Maxwell challenges us to ask for more--more pleasure, more beauty, more wonder, more mystery--for ourselves and the earth."--Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches

"It's not an exaggeration to say that Maxwell's work completely changed how I move through my daily life: who I love, how I love, and the way I think about the non-human world around me."--Liza Yeager, radio producer and writer

"Rachel Carson's environmentalist tract Silent Spring was profoundly influenced by her romantic relationship with her neighbor Dorothy Freeman, according to this bracing treatise.... A stimulating blend of biography and queer theory, this intrigues."--Publishers Weekly

"This wonderfully insightful consideration of Rachel Carson's loves reveals the enduring--and urgent--possibilities within her brilliant work."--Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts

"Reading Carson and Freeman's letters, Maxwell declares, have taught her that 'queer love can change the world.' An impassioned analysis."--Kirkus Reviews

"It is no longer enough to recycle or compost, or to shift our consumption to less energy-intensive items; we need to desire otherwise and reshape our cities and pastimes to excite other desires. This book offers an unusual and frequently moving reading of Rachel Carson to shift the tenor of climate writing today." --Lisa Disch, author of Making Constituencies

"Maxwell makes crucial interventions into the study of ecological destruction by placing heteronormativity at its center." ---Elisabeth Anker, author of Ugly Freedoms

About the Author

Lida Maxwell is Professor of Political Science & Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Boston University and the author of Insurgent Truth: Chelsea Manning and the Politics of Outsider Truth-Telling (2019), among other books.