This paper asks about the forms of freedom we can hope for. Exploring radical visions of freedom and justice, it shows the attachments to present-conditions that shape the promise of liberation. With a focus on decolonization, I thus read these visions alongside Lauren Berlant, as modes of cruel optimism – an attachment to the future that is discovered to be either completely impossible or “too possible, and toxic”; visions of freedom that reproduce the impasse of the present. I do so by looking into popular culture’s representations of such visions, focusing on two animated movies: Frozen II and Home. Both place at the fore the relationship between two female figures: two sisters in Frozen, and a daughter and her single mother in Home. All navigate intersecting orders of settler colonialism and patriarchy. Through them, I examine fantasies of social justice that cannot quite contend with the radical meanings such justice may entail. Such an inquiry is also a way of thinking through the role of fantasies in political lives.
