![]() ![]() How freedom is considered apart from constraint, and that binary notion of freedom and being constrained-and Nelson’s argument in favor of rejecting it-informs much of On Freedom. Freedom, of course, is what is typically taken away from a person as a (rather unimaginative) punishment whenever one is convicted of a serious crime that person is confined to a prison. ![]() On Freedom is divided into four “Songs of Care and Constraint” titled, in order, “Art Song,” “The Ballad of Sexual Optimism,” “Drug Fugue,” and “Riding the Blinds,” with each section considering freedom in the contexts of art and appropriation, sexual freedom and the #MeToo movement, addiction, and climate change, respectively. This allusion to prison confinement gives a hint to how Nelson approaches her consideration of freedom. “I had set out to write about cruelty,” she writes in the introduction, “then found, to my surprise, freedom coming through the cracks, light and air into cruelty’s stuffy cell.” The book, she tells us, grew out of a desire to understand freedom it came from questions that arose as “an unexpected subtext” to her 2011 book, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, which considered representations of cruelty and violence in art. The thoughtful, hybrid style, mixing the personal and theoretical, that characterized Maggie Nelson’s earlier books-such as The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial (2007) and The Argonauts (2015)-continues in On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, published last year. ![]()
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