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.
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