Unbound: The Ethics and Entanglements of Moll Cutpurse

At the end of Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton's city comedy The Roaring Girl (1611), Moll Cutpurse envisions a utopian future with fairer, kinder, and less restrictive gender and class relations.This article integrates José Esteban Muñoz's theory of queer futurity with a reassessment of bare life and Karen Barad's work on quantum entanglement and intra-active human agency.Though often described as vulnerable and passive in prevalent theories like Giorgio Agamben's, bare life reveals agency when explored on stage.As a liminal figure, Moll embodies the threshold: according to the dominant model of bare life, she should represent the abject, stripped of political and social rights.Yet, in comedy, the genre of utopian drama, she is both monstrous and mythical, her queerness operating as resistance.Manifesting the impossible in the present, she becomes a possibility for the future.Exploring the potentiality and futurity of bare life as a category and as a mode of resistance, the article analyses how a figure earmarked as powerless in critical thought disengages from the system that confines her and reclaims subjectivity, suggesting a future community.Rethinking bare life through The Roaring Girl along with a framework of ethics, entanglements, and temporality uncovers the concept's anarchic potential for transformation.