A Feminist Theory of Refusal

A Feminist Theory of Refusal
Author :
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Total Pages : 209
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780674248496
ISBN-13 : 067424849X
Rating : 4/5 (96 Downloads)

Book Synopsis A Feminist Theory of Refusal by : Bonnie Honig

Download or read book A Feminist Theory of Refusal written by Bonnie Honig and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.


A Feminist Theory of Refusal Related Books

A Feminist Theory of Refusal
Language: en
Pages: 209
Authors: Bonnie Honig
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2021-05-11 - Publisher: Harvard University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An acclaimed political theorist offers a fresh, interdisciplinary analysis of the politics of refusal, highlighting the promise of a feminist politics that does
A Feminist Theory of Refusal
Language: en
Pages: 209
Authors: Bonnie Honig
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2021-05-11 - Publisher: Harvard University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An acclaimed political theorist offers a fresh, interdisciplinary analysis of the politics of refusal, highlighting the promise of a feminist politics that does
No Mercy Here
Language: en
Pages: 356
Authors: Sarah Haley
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2016-02-17 - Publisher: UNC Press Books

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries imprisoned black women faced wrenching forms of gendered racial terror and heinous structures of economic e
What Women Want
Language: en
Pages: 252
Authors: Gayle Graham Yates
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 1975 - Publisher: Harvard University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The women's movement is perhaps the most baffling of the recent social reforms to sweep the United States. It is composed of numerous distinct groups, each with
Fat is a Feminist Issue
Language: en
Pages: 203
Authors: Susie Orbach
Categories: Food habits
Type: BOOK - Published: 1979 - Publisher:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK