This talk offers a reconsideration of Rachel Carson’s landmark book, Silent Spring. Through close examination of letters between Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, Maxwell will 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.

Professional Bio: Lida Maxwell is Professor of Political Science and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Boston University. She is the author of three books, including Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love (Stanford 2025) and Insurgent Truth: Chelsea Manning and the Politics of Outsider Truth-Telling (Oxford 2019). She has published articles in journals such as Political Theory, Theory and Event, and Contemporary Political Theory; and she is also the co-author of The Right to Have Rights (Verso 2018).