What the word means is none of your business . . . but it is indubitably your business where the word travels.
-- Wayne Koestenbaum (Introduction)

Importance: In her introduction, Nelson references American writer and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum's theories on freedom and language. She quotes Koestenbaum as having made the above assertion. Like Koestenbaum, Nelson holds that that the definition of the word freedom is not only elusive but not necessarily essential to pin down. Rather than arguing over the varying and multitude definitions of the word, Nelson argues in defense of tracing its travels. She uses Koestenbaum's mode of thought in the formal shaping of On Freedom, as she examines the implications of freedom through the lenses of art, sex, drugs, and climate change.

In each realm, I pay attention to the ways in which freedom appears knotted up with so-called unfreedom, producing marbled experiences of compulsion, discipline, possibility, and surrender.
-- Maggie Nelson (Introduction)

Importance: In her introduction, Nelson carefully...