The Pleasure(s) of Freedom

This essay complicates Anker's claim that the pleasure of sugar masks domination by examining diverse ways that theorists portray pleasure as connected to freedom, from John Locke to Hannah Arendt to Audre Lorde. While Locke seeks to produce pleasure as only appropriative, the essay argues that Audre Lorde theorizes pleasure differently: as a non-sovereign experience of vulnerability to unsettling knowledge and unknowable others that makes freedom as collective action possible. Finally, the essay reads Kara Walker's A Subtlety as both unmasking the dark side of appropriative pleasure and opening up the possibility of non-sovereign pleasure and freedom.