Radical Love: Core Concepts

Radical love suggests a non-ideological set of interpersonal relationship practices that are informed by both our own experiences and anarcha-feminist critiques of capitalist patriarchy, monogamy, and heterosexism (cite some references). In “civilized” societies, these social institutions inform many of the norms, expectations, and practices we come to expect as “natural” within both our friendships and romantic relationships. While radical love describes some boundary conditions for responsible, anti-authoritarian, feminist, and nonviolent intimate human-to-human relationships, it is not a map or definitive set of rules for how such relationships should function. Given the highly subjective and psychological aspects of interpersonal relationships, we emphasize that there is no one “right” or “ultimate” form of social relationship.

Some boundary conditions:

Consent among all those involved in the relationship is most important factor for the health of the relationship. This does not necessarily imply only human relationships. Consider entering a wild space for the first time. How might you go about asking permission?

*Friendship is the ground from which radical love grows. Friendship respects the bodily integrity, needs, desires, and differences of those involved in the relationship. Simply put, radical love implies radical friendship.

*Relationships are the primary, day-to-day battlegrounds for resistance to oppression. Ecofeminists (among other writers) have discussed a “self-in-relationship” in which our integrity and identity as humans is based on the acknowledgement of our ever shifting of human and other-than-human relationships.

*Radical love is an inherently political act: it is concomitant to resisting “larger” and oft-theorized forms of oppression such as capitalism, the state and civilization itself.

*Radical love implies acknowledging that patriarchal conditioning exists amongst all peoples within industrialized, civilized societies, and such conditioning is based on (minimally) class, race, gender, ability, and geographical factors.