Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love

Description

Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love
by Lida Maxwell

ISBN: 9781503640535
Hardcover, new
Publication Date: 1/28/2025

Brief Description:
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.