EAN: 9780674248496

A FEMINIST THEORY OF REFUSAL - BONNIE HONIG GEB...

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'
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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