The politics of love: Women's liberation and feeling differently

Contemporary queer interrogations of heteronormativity are fraught with the traces of feminist contestations of the intimate domains of women's 'ordinary' lives during the era of the women's liberation movement. These traces remain enigmatic within contemporary theories of public affect and emotion rather than incorporated into their critiques of the present political moment. This essay argues that the work of the early women's liberationists ĝ€" their attempts to bring the personal into view as the dense, affect laden, site of social reproduction ĝ€" can offer us a countermemory to the enduring and alluring force of the 'private' domains of love and ordinary feeling in the contemporary US national public sphere. In order to hear the echoes of that moment ĝ€" the time of women's liberation ĝ€" in this one, the essay stages a comparative reading between two novels, Doris Lessing's A Ripple from the Storm (1958) and June Arnold's The Cook and the Carpenter: A Novel by the Carpenter (1973). Although the two novels were written over a decade apart, both have as their subject the dense and complex relations between political action, personal relationships and feelings within a (broadly conceived) feminist paradigm. By taking the risk of an odd conjunction, and reading the two novels side-by-side, the essay aims to open up the messiness and contingencies of an era in which both 'the political' and 'the personal' were contested terms, their meanings challenged, their domains struggled over, their practices altered and, in some cases, transformed.