What are the constraints on efforts to strive for freedom? What are
the possibilities of imagining what it is to be free, to feel free?
And what is the felt cost of the struggle for freedom? This session
explores the contours of feeling around freedom, particularly in
response to oppressive systems. Moving beyond conventional
understandings of freedom, morality, and the good, the participants
consider the affects of longing and desire, harm and freedom, and
post-Enlightenment subjectivity. Feeling "more than free" acknowledges
an excess of feeling, the proliferation of "infinitely many" affective
attachments that push/pull bodies through the world, and
their repetition. Bodies are sites of conflicting, competing feelings
that make, leave, and shape subjectivity in ways that do not always
cohere. Affects are auto-telic; their purpose is fulfilled in their
feeling. Thus, feeling (> than) free embraces the incoherent, inchoate
ways that bodies fumble and strive toward imagined
ideals of freedom.
Tying together multi-disciplinary theoretical approaches of grief, my research considers the real-time institutional shifts within the largest US mainline and largest global Methodist denomination, The United Methodist Church (UMC). UMC members express grief and pain at the pending split over disagreements on the ordination and marriage rights of LGBTQ+ persons. Within my findings is a significant strand that ties language of harmed and freed to emotion and structural change. Research includes interviews and focus groups across several UMC conferences, content analysis of UMC-related documents, and over 900 in-depth qualitative surveys of current or previous UMC members.
Justice-oriented anger is a burdened virtue. This is what Lisa Tessman describes as moral goods for the oppressed. Justice-oriented anger sustains acts of resistance for those desiring freedom. This evaluation of anger as virtue looks to Martha Nussbaum’s conception of “transition-anger” that lacks a desire of payback. The absence of vengeance moves towards restorative justice. Keri Day’s conception of political moodiness in Azusa Reimagined helps to consider how to engage the emotional experiences of the vulnerable, including anger. Having to choose a less morally good option under circumstances of subjugation pales in comparison to the immorality that comes from perpetuating systems of oppression. Justice-oriented anger points people in the direction of resistance and restoration, behaviors that may be more commonly accepted as virtuous. Resistance should include anger if anger is present to the resistor, and anger should be recognized as sustained responses that can be morally good.
This paper explores a non-individual conception of freedom through a reimagination of the subject. Analyzing the liberal, post-Enlightenment self, and critiques of that self from affect theory and Black studies, the paper questions the idea that freedom can be understood in individual terms as the expression of rationality acting on/in the world. By underscoring how affect produces responses antecedent to conscious cognition, and historizing the “rational” self in colonial projects, the paper wonders how “calling” may situate a self within a more-than-human social world. Exploring the feeling of being called, and the ethics of responding, the paper rethinks freedom in collective terms. Rejecting individualist freedom predicated on violence toward others, as well as colonial forms of secularism and “religious freedom,” the paper imagines freedom as profoundly shared: not issuing from a subject but coming to it from elsewhere and animating it with ethical charge.