Liberation is (Im)Possible: 'Everything for Everyone' as a Praxis of Liberatory Impossibility

This thesis considers the story and storytelling of the 2022 visionary fiction novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 by M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi to explore the relationship between liberation and impossibility. The Introduction of this project posits a theoretical foundation for conceptualizing liberation in relation to impossibility and a grammar of queer abolition, arguing that both are important to the praxis of liberation. Chapters One and Two revolve specifically around analyzing the novel, and they respectively consider the novel’s content and genre as praxes of liberation. This thesis asks: What is the function of impossibility when considering liberation? And what does it mean to tell an impossible story? Further, this thesis posits Everything for Everyone not only as imagining a liberatory world, but as using “critical future fabulation” to tell an impossible story – or, a story of liberation in a liberatory way. Ultimately, this piece highlights the necessity of impossible storytelling and seeks to inspire us to take seriously how we can make sense of our embodiment and reimagine knowledge in pursuit of liberation. This thesis dreams that we might each lean into the audacity of imagining boldly and broadly so that when we ask ourselves if we feel “free enough,” we might hold hand in hand the importance of addressing the barriers to freedom presented by our immediate material reality, and the grammatical constraints that attempt to foreclose our ability to imagine an expansive freedom.