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A Feminist Theory of Refusal - Hardcover | Diverse Reads

A Feminist Theory of Refusal

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An acclaimed political theorist offers a fresh, interdisciplinary analysis of the politics of refusal, highlighting the promise of a feminist politics that does not simply withdraw from the status quo but also transforms it.

The Bacchae, Euripides's fifth-century tragedy, famously depicts the wine god Dionysus and the women who follow him as indolent, drunken, mad. But Bonnie Honig sees the women differently. They reject work, not out of laziness, but because they have had enough of women's routine obedience. Later they escape prison, leave the city of Thebes, explore alternative lifestyles, kill the king, and then return to claim the city. Their "arc of refusal," Honig argues, can inspire a new feminist politics of refusal.

Refusal, the withdrawal from unjust political and economic systems, is a key theme in political philosophy. Its best-known literary avatar is Herman Melville's Bartleby, whose response to every request is, "I prefer not to." A feminist politics of refusal, by contrast, cannot simply decline to participate in the machinations of power. Honig argues that a feminist refusal aims at transformation and, ultimately, self-governance. Withdrawal is a first step, not the end game.

Rethinking the concepts of refusal in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Adriana Cavarero, and Saidiya Hartman, Honig places collective efforts toward self-governance at refusal's core and, in doing so, invigorates discourse on civil and uncivil disobedience. She seeks new protagonists in film, art, and in historical and fictional figures including Sophocles's Antigone, Ovid's Procne, Charlie Chaplin's Tramp, Leonardo da Vinci's Madonna, and Muhammad Ali. Rather than decline the corruptions of politics, these agents of refusal join the women of Thebes first in saying no and then in risking to undertake transformative action.

ISBN-13: 9780674248496

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Publication Date: 05-11-2021

Pages: 208

Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

Series: Mary Flexner Lectures of Bryn Mawr College #4

Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Political Science at Brown University. Her books include Antigone, Interrupted; Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair; the prizewinning Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics and Emergency Politics.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Introduction: The Bacchae's Arc of Refusal and the Tragedy of the City 1

Chapter 1 Inoperativity and the Power of Assembly: Agamben with Butler 14

Chapter 2 Inclination and the Work of Dis/orientation: Cavarero with Ahmed 45

Chapter 3 Fabulation and the Right to the City: Hartman with Arendt 72

Conclusion: Sister Is an Anagram for Resist 101

Appendix

Inoperativity in Chaplin's Modern Times 111

Inclination in Erin Courtney's A Map of Virtue 116

Fabulation in Astra Taylor's What Is Democracy? 120

Muhammad Ali's Repertoire of Refusal 123

Notes 133

Acknowledgments 185

Index 189