Queer/Love/Bird Extinction
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring as a Work of Love
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5778480 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lida Maxwell (Department of Political Science, Trinity College, Hartford, CT, USA, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 682-704 |
| Publication date | 2017-05-29 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Political Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0090-5917 • E-ISSN: 1552-7476 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0090591717712024 |
| OpenAlex | W2619423639 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 11 |
This essay argues for reading Rachel Carson's Silent Spring as a work of love that calls for an environmental politics of desire rather than self-preservation narrowly construed. I make this argument by reading Silent Spring in conjunction with the extant love letters of Carson and Dorothy Freeman, where they depict their love as a wondrous multispecies achievement constituted through encounters with birds. I argue that their example reveals that love need be neither worldless nor heteronormative, but may be a world-disclosing practice that leads individuals to live, and desire to live, differently. Reading Silent Spring through the lens of these letters, I argue that it calls us to see the threat insecticides pose not only to "mere life" (Honig) but also to pleasurable lives of wonder and love. I build on Silent Spring to argue for an alternative politics of survival in the face of climate change: one that foregrounds the connections between inter-human affects and a vibrant multispecies world, between intimate and public feelings, and calls for preservation of a multispecies world through and on behalf of human pleasure
Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Environmental ethics · Feeling · Pleasure · Political science · Politics · Queer · Reading (process · Sociology · Wonder · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology
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Reading for Asexual Rhetorics in the Archives of Rachel Carson
The cause of labor is the hope of the earth
Animals, Angelenos, and the Arbitrary
The Pleasure(s) of Freedom
Ecological issues are care issues and care issues are ecological issues
Rachel Carson and a Sea of Queer Intimacies
June Jordan’s Political Theory of Redesign
Wonder at What Is as It Is’
Save the Appearances! Toward an Arendtian Environmental Politics
Environmental Politics of Reproduction
| Unique citing works | 11 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,57 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2026 (8) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 10 |