After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, freedom was the dominant term used to describe the United States in national political discourse. It was articulated as sovereign power, unencumbered agency, and military triumph. “Freedom” eventually animated global violence, becoming a justification for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as for substantial increases in state surveillance. A significant body of feminist scholarship has interrogated the discourse of post-9/11 freedom, examining how the call to “free the women of Afghanistan and Iraq” legitimated the push for war (Bhattacharrya Reference Bhattacharyya2008; Marso Reference Marso, Marso and Ferguson2007; Mohanty Reference Mohanty2008). For these scholars, “freedom” transformed feminist concerns into tools of militarism and imperialism, while worsening living conditions of women across the globe. In this essay, I also examine the discourse of post-9/11 freedom from a feminist perspective, but I ask a different question: How can feminist political theory critique the discourse of American freedom and challenge its trajectory of sovereign and violent state power? In other words, I examine the discourse of Americans upholding their own freedom, rather than their quest to free others, and insist that feminist theoretical arguments are directly relevant to post-9/11 problematics.

Drawing upon feminist theories of nonsovereign freedom, I contend that the use of the term freedom in post-9/11 discourse worked to reestablish sovereign state power after it was devastated by the 9/11 events, no less than by decades of globalization and neoliberalism. Post-9/11 discourse deployed a concept of freedom as sovereignty that disavowed the breakdown of sovereignty as an operative norm in contemporary politics. The post-9/11 use of freedom thus exposes an important layer of American politics, whereby the global and neoliberal forces of late modernity that disrupt the premises of sovereignty are managed such that sovereignty is eventually rehabilitated as an operative norm.

I will argue that freedom in the contemporary era is not achievable as sovereignty and global triumph, and that the current pursuit of sovereignty even produces freedom's failure. Freedom is an indispensable political ideal, however, that marks the capacity for world making and participation in the terms governing one's existence, and thus must be reconceived in more viable ways. One option is to relocate the possibility of freedom within experiences of heteronomy, dependence, and failure. Although these experiences might be considered the opposite of freedom from the perspective of sovereignty, feminist political theorists have instead offered them as fecund sites for reimagining and practicing it. These relocations offer more productive possibilities for cultivating freedom than the ways it is currently envisioned in the pursuit of sovereignty.

The Violence of Freedom

After the 9/11 events, Americans were described in official political discourse as “the brightest beacon for freedom” who “defend freedom,” “enlarge the circle of human freedom,” and “who have died for our freedom.”Footnote ¹ Freedom was what the U.S. represented, loved, and operated in the service of; as a “freedom-loving people,” it was what its citizens would die for, and what they would defend and spread in the wake of the 9/11 events.Footnote ² Freedom was, at once, an agentic subject and a desired outcome of political power. Personified as an agent of war, freedom required the United States to fight its battles as its avatar: “It is both our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom's fight. . . . We have known freedom's price. We have shown freedom's power. And in this great conflict, my fellow Americans, we will see freedom's victory.”Footnote ³ Freedom was a victorious American way of life desired by all peoples, yet the world was violently organized by its movement: “Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom—the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time—now depends on us.”Footnote ⁴ Freedom, tautologically, became necessary to ensure freedom. It variously signified human civilization, a wartime tactic, the nation, individual Americans, triumphal U.S. victory, domination over others, and a nebulous yet commonly held political ideal.

Yet for all its polysemy, freedom indexed a set of affiliated terms and modes of political agency. It often meant mastery over the global order. Freedom was the capacity to determine the course of geopolitics, to establish a state of invulnerability to violence. The Iraq War's combat zone was “the front lines of freedom.”Footnote ⁵ Freedom was equated with both individual and state sovereignty; indeed, it provided a site at which they were conflated, as if the achievement of state sovereignty would confer personal sovereignty upon every American (Anker Reference Anker2012). It required unencumbered agency and uncoerced decision making, and also seemed to necessitate overcoming or triumphing over other governments and worldviews. As George W. Bush said in one breath announcing the beginning of the Iraq War: “We will defend our freedom. We will bring freedom to others and we will prevail.”Footnote ⁶ President Obama similarly, though more perspicaciously, asserted, “We protect our own freedom and prosperity by extending it to others.”Footnote ⁷ It was America's job to “Secure Freedom's Triumph”: The nation's own uncoerced actions could only be ensured by geopolitical victory over others.Footnote ⁸ Freedom meant that the nation—and, by extension, the individual citizen—was both free from others but also perhaps free for and over others, the latter seemingly necessary to ensure the former.

It came as no surprise that official names for both wars utilized freedom as their key subject: Afghanistan as “Operation: Enduring Freedom” and Iraq as “Operation: Iraqi Freedom.” Freedom discursively enabled war. As Condoleezza Rice explained, “The United States is a very special country in that when we maintain this position of military strength that we have now, we do so in support of a balance of power that favors freedom.”Footnote ⁹ Employed in speeches espousing war, domestic regulation, and national security, the pursuit of American “freedom” authorized warfare, imperialism, detention, rendition, the Department of Homeland Security, the USA Patriot Act, the neoliberal privatization of other nations' national industries, and the death of hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

Freedom in Heteronomy

This impasse, in which discursive deployments of freedom are paradoxically used to abrogate freedom, also marks a critical opening for feminist political thought. The equation of freedom as sovereign mastery has been scrutinized by various feminist theorists who have challenged it, on the one hand, as a masculinist formulation of agency that both generates women's dependence on men and inscribes a patriarchal social structure and, on the other hand, as a profound misreading of the relational, interdependent, and even intersubjective ground of social relations. Feminist critiques of sovereignty offer key resources to challenge the discourse of post-9/11 American freedom.

The first critique I examine directly challenges post-9/11 deployments of freedom as sovereignty and mastery, for many feminists have long argued that freedom must be understood and practiced within conditions of profound social interdependence. This insight comes from feminist political theory that engages psychoanalytic and sociological as well as Marxist frameworks, and includes work by Benhabib (Reference Benhabib1992), Butler (Reference Butler1997, Reference Butler2004), Young (Reference Young1990), and Zerilli (Reference Zerilli2005). It connects to earlier radical feminist claims that the pursuit of freedom must be collective, which in many ways presume social interdependence (Combahee River Collective Reference Freedman2007; Eisenstein Reference Eisenstein1978). Understanding freedom through interdependence attends to, rather than disavows, individuals' political, social, and economic reliance on others, and accounts for heteronomous structural hierarchies that condition what freedom entails and how it is experienced for different populations. As Brown (Reference Brown1995) argues, freedom is a way of distributing power that involves collective engagements with the specific interdependencies and oppressions that shape existing social, economic, and political contexts. Individual sovereignty, by contrast, offers an atomistic model of freedom that narrows possibilities for political agency, and perhaps even inhibits emancipatory politics by foreclosing the collaborative work necessary to achieve it. As Marso (Reference Marso, Marso and Ferguson2007, 231) contends, drawing from Simone de Beauvoir: “The individual subject experiences desires and may be capable of achieving freedom, but only within a body and a world not of her own choosing. . . . Freedom is a ‘reaching out to the world’ that is accomplished through collective projects rather than solely an individual consciousness achieved alone.” The connection between freedom and interdependence that these thinkers pursue does not shore up an autonomous self through others' recognition of one's selfhood but, instead, underscores relations of power in which individuals are inevitably intertwined—and the collective practices and shared responsibility for and with others that arise from them. Heteronomy, in this instance, is not the opposite but the groundwork of freedom.

Feminist analyses of sovereignty offer critical inquiry into post-9/11 discourses of American freedom. Some feminists have examined how these discourses rehabilitated a show of masculinist power (Faludi Reference Faludi2007; Young Reference Young2003). Yet feminist insights can also explain why the discourse of sovereign freedom resurged at the very moment 9/11 dramatized the failure of sovereignty. The 9/11 events disclosed—in a spectacular and horrifying way—how the pursuit of global sovereign mastery is unattainable in the contemporary era. Those violent actions revealed territorial porosity no less than the inescapability of human interdependence.  In smoothly penetrating national borders, the attacks upended beliefs that America was invulnerable to serious attack by foreigners and that geopolitical boundaries could demarcate state sovereignty. Indiscriminately murdering unknown people, the attackers also challenged the premises of individual self-reliance, what Krause (Reference Krause2011, 1) calls the long-standing liberal belief that “the individual is understood to be the master of her own domain.” September 11 shed light on the social vulnerability of individual bodies and on the impossibility of truly mastering one's own domain. It revealed how individuals are, as Butler (Reference Butler2004, 20) has forcefully argued, dependent on others because they are inescapably “exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure.” In highlighting these features of modern subjectivity, 9/11 destabilized the premise that sovereignty is both a state and individual ontology.

Challenges to sovereignty extend far beyond 9/11 to more long-standing shifts in late modern power, social structure, and agency. I leave debates over the constitutive nature of dependence to one side so as to highlight briefly that socially produced human interdependence has been intensifying for decades. As feminists and others have noted, heightened interdependence is the effect of vast transnational immigration networks sustained by global inequities in work opportunities and sustainable incomes; the rising popularity of human rights discourses; ethnic wars; transnational solidarities; disease trajectories; multinational consolidations of economic power; and resource scarcities. It is the effect of globalization's erosion of state boundaries through international governance and trade agreements, and neoliberal privatizations of transnational industry. These intensifications illustrate what Brown (Reference Brown2010) calls the contemporary era's “waning sovereignty.” The version of freedom saturating political discourse after 9/11 thus seems to rely upon a norm and ontology of masterful sovereignty that is outmoded at best for understanding contemporary power and agency, given current conditions in which individuals live and governing institutions operate. Rather than disavowing intensifying interdependence with hyperbolic claims of sovereign freedom, feminist critiques of sovereignty teach us to ask: What possibilities for freedom exist within globalized conditions of interdependence? How must collective pursuits of freedom account for shifting conditions of inequality and increasingly complex networks of power that produce unfreedom at both global and individual levels? If individual agency is necessarily imbricated in and dependent upon the lives of others, then how do we practice freedom in ways organized through these lived entanglements?

Freedom in Failure

The second feminist counterdiscourse challenges the U.S. positioning of freedom as triumphal mastery, arguing that freedom can take form through experiences of failure. Halberstam (Reference Halberstam2011, 4) argues for reappropriating “the art of failure” as a feminist and queer strategy that refutes celebratory stories of progress and heroism in order to thematize the failure of current governing systems and social norms to enable lived experiences of freedom. Those who practice it “use experiences of failure to confront the gross inequalities of everyday life in the U.S.” Failure repudiates oppressive social relations and gives those who “fail” relief from the pressure to measure up to constraining and patriarchal norms of achievement, which are themselves a form of unfreedom. It thus provides the opening to map a different logic of being in the world than what is dictated by an idealized masculine sovereign subject. To Halberstam, “Failure is a way of refusing to acquiesce to dominant logics of power and discipline, and as a form of critique . . . that presents an opportunity rather than a dead end.” (Reference Halberstam2011, 88–96) Challenging the conventional grammar of freedom, failure reveals its breakdowns, aporias, and violences. It aligns with feminists working at the nexus of the Frankfurt school and continental critical theory, who insist that freedom can be neither conceived as an abstract norm nor applied in the same way at all times to all people, but entails specific practices of world making that demand precise interrogations of lived unfreedoms (Brown Reference Brown1995; Cornell Reference Cornell2008; Mahmood Reference Mahmood2005). Both failure and critical feminist theory denormalize dominant ideals of generalized freedom that often premise a sovereign subject, yet the work of failure emphasizes what happens when the norms under critique cannot achieve their stated strategies, and illustrates the lived effects of failed sovereignty upon individual and collective bodies.

Failure critiques post-9/11 freedom precisely because it can highlight broad social and collective failures to achieve the predominant terms of freedom offered in political discourse. Failure emphasizes the catastrophic effects of the claim that freedom requires the sovereign triumph over terror. It renarrativizes the post-9/11 era to track how the U.S. pursuit of freedom caused the death of thousands of people in the nations it aimed to free, and obscured intense forms of unfreedom that continue to reverberate throughout the globe. Failure organizes the domestic story of freedom into the loss of civil liberties and the continually declining opportunities for political participation. While these story lines are not unfamiliar to those who have condemned the wars, they directly link the discourse of freedom to its own failure, revealing how failure was embedded in the very pursuit of sovereign triumph. Failure shows how concrete unfreedoms were engendered by the quest for sovereignty.

The use of “freedom” after 9/11, in this line of analysis, could, therefore, be read as a desperate attempt to prove that freedom can still be practiced as sovereignty in a nonsovereign world. It intended to revivify beliefs in unencumbered self-determination and state control over the global field after they had failed—indeed, after they had already lost their relevance as governing strategies. The discourse of freedom implied that complex interdependencies could be overcome by heroic unilateral acts of state power reasserting U.S. global might, which would refract back to American individuals their ability to live a life of unbridled license. Post-9/11 freedom thus functioned at one level as Minerva's Owl, hearkening the dusk of an insufficient and outdated discourse of freedom. But at another level, it was a way to refuse sovereignty's twilight as an organizing concept. It aimed to revivify the promise of sovereignty over the contingencies of political life. Globalized vulnerabilities and dependencies were confronted by the fantastical promise that they could be overcome through masterful acts of sovereign power, the very acts of power that globalization, neoliberalism, and biopolitical regulation, no less than terrorism, mark as increasingly irrelevant. Rethinking sovereign freedom through its failures allows us to ask: How can we tarry with failure as a condition of political possibility? How is failure a source for reconceiving what freedom can and should entail? What are alternatives to freedom imagined as sovereign triumph besides humiliation, powerlessness, or oppression?

In conclusion, these feminist critiques form a two-pronged strategy against the way that freedom has been normalized after 9/11. First, they directly challenge the equation of freedom with sovereign action and global triumph, and undo its easy legitimation of war, murder, and surveillance. They reveal how it produces violence while disavowing both the complexities of human interdependence and the waning of sovereignty as a practice of freedom. Second, they employ different interpretations of power and agency that can create openings for reconceiving freedom more in dialogue with the contemporary moment. Failure, in particular, can be a form of refusal that frees those who experience it to imagine lives and norms outside of available expectations of sovereign triumph. In offering openings, neither of these counterclaims is freedom exactly, if we define freedom as a practice of world making that requires direct and shared participation in the decisions governing collective and individual existence. Instead, in the context of post-9/11 politics, their insistence on existing interdependencies and the critical possibilities of failure become not the opposite of freedom but the starting point for thinking and practicing freedom differently from the ways in which it is violently imagined in political discourse.