At a time when bigots and thugs deploy “free speech” as a disingenuous, weaponized rallying cry, it makes sense that some would respond by criticizing, refusing, or vilifying the discourse of freedom, and postulating care in its place. But care demands our scrutiny as well, as do the consequences of placing the two terms in opposition.

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

From Klein, Sedgwick extrapolated something she called “reparative reading,” which she contrasted with “paranoid reading” (“reading” functions here quite broadly, spanning different media): the former is a means of seeking pleasure, nourishment, and amelioration, whereas the latter aims to forestall pain and ward off threats.

without suppression, shaming, or ejection as go-to options, we learn to fellowship differently.

Yet one of art’s most compelling features is how it showcases the disjuncts between the time of composition, the time of dissemination, and the time of consideration—disjuncts that can summon us to humility and wonder. Such temporal amplitude understandably falls out of favor in politically polarized times, in which the pressure to make clear “whic

Refusing to take up the burden of how one’s art may make innumerable, heterogeneous, essentially uncontrollable others feel does not to me signify ethical failure.

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.

It’s the homogenizing logic of paranoia that works overtime to flatten or disregard such differences; it’s the homogenizing logic of paranoia that demands that all people have the same response to them, and always will.

It may sting when you get (or give) an I Can’t, but it likely indicates that care is engaged elsewhere.