Categories, Citizenship, Erotic Agency, and the Problem of Freedom

This essay, in discussion of Citizenship From Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom by Mimi Sheller, underscores the need to historicize Caribbean sociocultures as complex ensembles of heterogeneous practices. It lauds efforts to sustain the investigation of the gendered agential capacities of Caribbean working people in their relation with various manifestations of modern cultures of power. The essay questions the liberatory potential of erotic agency or power, arguing for it to be theorized beyond sexually active bodies, particularistic identities and the social and hegemonic landscapes of sexual politics. Erotic agency, it posits, should be situated and historicized in a broader web of social relations, especially given the potentially contradictory effects of its exercise.