The Politics of Love explores the entanglement of emotions, social movements, and science in reconfiguring human and nonhuman relations. As Darwin's evolutionary theory informed the development of sexual science and the sex reform movement between the 1890s and the 1920s, sex reformers emerged as a group of diverse and culturally influential professionals—doctors, psychologists, artists, political activists, novelists, and academics—who shared a profound commitment to changing the world by changing the practice of sex. Sex reformers reinvented love as a scientific practice of sex that brought humans and nonhumans into the fold of early-twentieth-century racial, gender, and sexual politics. Carla Christina Hustak illuminates how sex reformers' insistence that love can shift human and nonhuman relations is more than just a historical narrative—it is a moment in time interconnected with urgent contemporary concerns over the global implications of our emotional relationships to other humans, animals, the earth, and atmospheric and technological forces.
Carla Christina Hustak is an independent historian of gender and sexuality in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Britain and the United States.
"In this fascinating book, Carla Hustak connects experiments with marriage, free love, and birth control to theories of evolution and eugenics as advocated by sex reformers at the turn of the twentieth century. We are still grappling with the consequences of this 'politics of love.'"—Sarah Amato, author of Beastly Possessions: Animals in Victorian Consumer Culture
"This is a provocative, informative, and compelling book that positions nonhuman animals as critical actors in the Anglo-American sex-reform movement of the early twentieth century. Its creative premise packs a powerful intellectual punch guaranteed to intrigue, inspire, and enlighten a wide range of readers."—Christabelle Sethna, Professor, Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies, University of Ottawa
238 pp.6 x 9Illus: 9 b/w images
9780520395213$85.00|£71.00Hardcover
Jan 2024