Anarchists and others debate free love in theory and practice. What is the relationship between social and sexual transformation? First published in Laurence Davis and Ruth Kinna, (eds) 2009, Anarchism and Utopianism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp.153-170. This version contains a minor update in note 27.
Key Words: anarchism, desire, feminism, fin de siècle, free love, love, marriage, performativity, queer theory, sexual politics, speech acts, utopianism
People: Edward Carpenter, Voltairine de Cleyre, Emma Goldman, Edith Lanchester, Lillian Harman, Charlotte Wilson, Karl Pearson, Henry Seymour, Oscar Wilde, Mary Wollstonecraft
Copyright: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. 
However, Manchester University Press requires written permission from both them and me if you wish to republish it.
However, Manchester University Press requires written permission from both them and me if you wish to republish it.
Download Speaking Desire as a Word document for personal use.
Speaking Desire: anarchism and free love as utopian performance in fin de siècle Britain
by Judy Greenway
The most beautiful thing around or above
Is Love, true Love:
The beautiful thing can more beautiful be
If its life be free.
Bind the most beautiful thing there is,
And the serpents hiss;
Free from its fetters the beautiful thing,
And the angels sing.
Louisa Bevington, 1895 1
Introduction
Free love, for many anarchists in late nineteenth century Britain, was integral to any vision of a transformed society. A better world was on the agenda, and how to bring it about was the subject of intense anarchist debate. Then as now, anarchism was often characterised negatively as utopian, meaning unrealistic, unachievable. Anarchists often responded by trying to dissociate anarchism from utopianism, insisting that it was not ‘an artificially concocted, fanciful theory of reconstructing the world’, but based on ‘truth and reality’. 2 Tolstoy and Kropotkin, whose ideas inspired several utopian communities in Britain, criticised such experimentation as a diversion from the wider struggle for change. 3
Others, however, saw things differently:
[P]ropaganda cannot be diversified enough if we want to touch all. We want it to pervade and penetrate all the utterances of life, social and political, domestic and artistic, educational and recreational. There should be propaganda by word and action, the platform and the press, the street corner, the workshop and the domestic circle, acts of revolt, and the example of our lives as freemen. 4
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