On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint

Such an approach invites us to leave behind the poles of pre- vs. post-liberatory, negativity vs. positivity, optimism vs. pessimism, utopia vs. dystopia, and to reckon instead with the fact that everything is not going to be OK, that no one or nothing is coming to save us, and that this is both searingly difficult and also fine.

You can work to make a safe environment, but if the teachings at hand are meant to rattle, people are going to feel rattled.

Ambivalence about responsibility for our own freedom does not mean we are stupid, self-destructive, incapable, or desirous of harm. It means we are human. And part of being human is not always wanting every moment of our lives to be a step on a long march toward emancipation and enlightenment.

Yet even when our complaints are justified, it’s worth staying alert to the ways in which complaint can become a default posture, a negative feedback loop, wherein we cultivate the habit of shoring up our own virtue or worth by distancing ourselves from the sorry, sordid desires and defects we diagnose in others. We need to be able to lodge our com

And yet, desire consistently purchased at the price of plausible deniability comes at a cost, both to oneself, and to the nature of the relationships or encounters it generates. Unlike cruising, wherein one acknowledges that one is looking for sex in some form, insisting that one is asking for or seeking nothing reifies the tiresome sexist construc

The eruption of these issues into the realm of art via the uncritical valorization of care no doubt contributed to my “yuck,” insofar as it risks suggesting that art—a realm to which women have been allowed entrance basically one second ago in human history—should become yet another place where women must grapple with an already-feminized, maternal

Analyzing the power dynamics of any particular scenario can be crucial to our understanding what happened and why. It does not follow, however, that if elements of power exist—as they always do—our agency is extinguished, or that an abuse of power has occurred. The exercise of agency is always a negotiation of available possibilities and pressures;

It also risks reducing care to giving, protecting, and fixing, rather than treating it as a negotiation of needs that involves assuming strength in the other, resisting the temptation to provide all the answers, inevitable failure and disappointment, allowing for the fact that our desires for others may chafe against what those others want for them

One irony of holding art to a utilitarian standard is that it echoes capitalism’s own fixation on quantifiable results—in which case, celebrating art for its nonutilitarian aspects, for the “nothing” it makes happen, can be a means of calling attention to the presence of a different schema of values, a different mode of being.