Victoria Hesford

Review of A Feminist Theory of Refusal by Bonnie Honig. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021.

One of the best lines in Bonnie Honig’s A Feminist Theory of Refusal comes towards the end, in the title of her conclusion: “Sister is an Anagram for Resist” (101). Sisterhood is a key concept for Honig’s feminism. It was central to her re-reading of Antigone in her 2013 book, Antigone Interrupted, and it is an important feature of her re-reading of Euripides’ play, the Bacchae, in A Feminist Theory of Refusal. Contemporary feminists would be forgiven for being wary of this turn to sisterhood. Sisterhood, after all, has often been invoked by white feminists largely as an act of assimilation, appropriation, and elision of black and women of color feminism. Much like the duet between Annie Lennox and Aretha Franklin in the Eurythmics’ feminist anthem of the 1980s, feminist sisterhood has often meant reducing the most powerful voices to a supporting role. We might think of the 1970 women’s liberation anthology, Sisterhood is Powerful, or perhaps the institutionalization of intersectionality in women’s studies departments in the early 2000s, as examples of a feminist sisterhood that elide the asymmetries of power between white women and their black and women of color colleagues. Alternatively, we can think of the claim—“Sisterhood is Powerful!”—as part of a feminism that traffics in sentimentality and wishful thinking rather than the hard work of coalition building. Honig’s conception of sisterhood, or “sororal solidarity” as she calls it in Antigone Interrupted, is neither an assumption of sameness nor a sentimental cry of affiliation; it is, rather, agonistic, her term for the difficult, risky, compromised acting in concert with others that may, or may not, end in emancipation (Honig 2013, 154). Sisterhood is political, and for that reason it is also, for Honig, fundamentally undecidable: it takes the risk of being disposed to others outside of the oedipal frame and as a transgression of the patriarchal order. A sister is also, therefore, a more general minoritarian figure for Honig, as her nomination of Muhammed Ali as an exemplary figure of refusal testifies.

A Feminist Theory of Refusal was published in the spring of 2021 and appeared in tandem with Honig’s book of short essays and opinion pieces, Shell Shocked: Feminist Criticism after Trump. While the attempt to assess the vitality of feminism in response to Trumpism is more explicit in Shell Shocked, the desire to find a repertoire of theoretical concepts and interpretive frames that would effectively elucidate a means of resistance to the rising authoritarianism, overt racism, and rampant misogyny of the Trump years is also implicit in A Feminist Theory of Refusal. With both books, Honig attempts to engage with the state of emergency that is the present in order to return us to the question of how to do feminist politics for the future. In Shell Shocked Honig maps out the domain of feminist criticism, as distinct from feminist theory, as a mode of responsiveness to current conditions that is both immediate and speculative and reliant on the subversive catharsis of humor. A Feminist Theory of Refusal, on the other hand, offers a set of concepts through which a feminist “arc of refusal” can be mapped, both as a theorization of how feminists might turn modes of resistance into a politics, and as an elucidation of the specificity of feminism as a political theory. Although their genre of address is different, each book, perhaps surprisingly, exudes a hopefulness for an anticipated future in which democracy is not always already over but readied, perhaps for the first time, to witness the joy and act on the knowledge of its marginalized subjects.

A Feminist Theory of Refusal is based on a series of lectures Honig gave for the Mary Flexner Lectureship at Bryn Mawr College in the fall of 2017. Split into three central chapters with a short introduction and conclusion, the book retains the style and organization of a series of lectures, though Honig has substantially revised them for publication and added an appendix. There is something to be said for the clarity and brevity of the lecture format for presenting a theoretical argument, and Honig’s writing is elegant, economical, yet alive with a restrained but confident rhetorical flair. Despite its relative brevity (or perhaps because of it), the book offers a substantial theoretical engagement with three key concepts—inoperativity, inclination, and fabulation—that Honig identifies as central to a specifically feminist politics of refusal. The clarity of Honig’s engagement with the three major thinkers she draws on for her discussion of each concept—the Italian philosophers’ Giorgio Agamben and Adriana Cavarero, as well as the American literary theorist and historian, Saidiya Hartman—are one of the book’s many strengths, as is the preciseness with which she differentiates her conceptualization of each term from theirs. Honig’s approach to the writers and thinkers she engages with in the book is generous and generative; she reads their work, even when critical, as she is with Agamben, as incitement for her own thinking. They are, if you like, sisters-in-thought—thinkers Honig is disposed towards and with whom she conspires to offer a re-framing of key problematics in feminist theory.

Why turn to the classics? This is a question Honig feels the need to ask her readers directly at the end of chapter three, and her answer is revealing, both of her method and of her understanding of politics:

Why bother with Euripides? Because to leave the archive where it is and build elsewhere is to be pressed into fugitivity’s path. Leaving the archive alone, we abet its reproduction of the same. This is the choice. In my view, agonism is the answer. (Honig 2021a, 100)

For Honig, returning to the archive is part of the necessary return to the city, it is an act of re-engagement with and contestation of the communal terms by which people are held in relation to each other. In Honig’s Arendtian and Rancierian understanding of the political, to do politics is to take the risk of acting in concert with others to transform the conditions of the possible, not only for those who act, but for “those left behind, still partitioned by old divisions into silence or powerlessness” (Honig 2021a, 95). The idea of return—to old or familiar texts and concepts, to established canons of thought, to the city—animates Honig’s reading strategy, it is the method by which she interrupts hegemonic or consensus forms of knowing. She re-writes and re-tells canonical stories about women to contest and rearticulate their meaning. In other words, Honig cannot “leave the archive where it is” because, as a scholar of political theory, she is formed by it. The archive is the means, if not the ends, of her thinking on politics and feminism.

This idea of return—to the canon, to the city—distinguishes Honig’s theory of refusal from that of the Indigenous and Black Studies scholars who first recognized its conceptual importance for political theory. In the work of Indigenous scholars such as Glen Coulthard and Audra Simpson, for example, as well as in that of Black Studies scholars such as Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, refusal does not, as Honig acknowledges, refer to a withdrawal from or correction to western liberal democracy. Rather, it indicates an active, ongoing dissent from settler colonialism in the case of Indigenous Studies, and an ongoing “fugitive” rejection of the conventions and norms of a white hegemonic world in the case of Black Studies. The turn to refusal, in the work of these scholars, aims to recognize and validate modes of collective survival that exist outside of, or run counter to the modern, settler-colonial nation-state, and actively challenges attachments to the institutional structures that have contained and curtailed the freedom of black and indigenous peoples. By insisting on the necessity of a return to the city, however, Honig ultimately locates feminism within the institutions and truth regimes of modern democracies, not outside them. The city, as the figure for a democratic polis or community organized and imagined through patriarchal and familial structures, makes feminist dissent both a necessity and a possibility.

Honig’s departure from Black Studies and Indigenous scholars on the usefulness of refusal for feminism does not dismiss nor negate their understanding of refusal. Instead, her approach is one of interruption as addition, of putting into play another version of the concept as an invitation to think with and against each other. The question for Honig is not which conceptualization of refusal is better, or more radical, but rather what are the ends as well as the means of your politics? Her answer in A Feminist Theory of Refusal is that, for feminism, the ends of politics is, ultimately, “regicidal”; it is a politics that “seeks to put an end to the old order” through an “arc of refusal” that first rejects the patriarchal order, then creates alternative forms of subjectivity and relationality through experimental and prefigurative forms of communal life, and finally returns to confront the old order with stories and theories that provide new meaning and ways of being (4). The feminism Honig calls for in A Feminist Theory of Refusal is both “normative” and “civic” in that it is both implicated in, and engages with, established institutions and centers of power. It is a feminism that “risks the impurities of politics” rather than the potential freedoms of fugitivity (1). For Honig feminism cannot exist—as a politics—outside the city walls.

While the politics of feminism has often collapsed into utilitarian ends it has also, from its beginnings, inaugurated ways of thinking and being with others that risk its undoing as a limited and limiting form of (bourgeois, white, western, and colonial) collectivization. For Honig, this is the possibility and the point of feminism—that, through its potentiality as a sisterhood, it will bring into being a world that is no longer constituted through the old hierarchies of gender, race, and class. For feminism to realize its transformative potential, however, requires feminists to confront both the difficulty of sisterhood—its undecidability—and the implications of feminism’s regicidal ends. The usefulness of the Greeks for this confrontation is apparent throughout Honig’s work. Precisely because they are not modern, the plays of Sophocles and Euripides offer Honig (and feminism) a past that is “more alien and resistant to appropriation” and as a result “may produce more instructive insights” of our present “than the sort that seeks and finds our stammering selves in the mirror” (Honig 2013, 32). The Greeks present a world without sentimentality and without the modern conception of the social—the mise en scene for the melodrama through which feminism has so often been understood and understood itself. Instead of melodrama, the Greeks offer us tragedy, the genre closely connected to politics as “unsettled grievance” (Ranciere 2021, 102). Tragedy alters the view through which we might apprehend the stakes of feminism; it presents us with a world riven by injustice and without the comforting familiarity of a sentimental resolution to suffering. When we read Antigone or the Bacchae we are presented with women and men who act and speak in ways alien to our modern sensibilities and absent the scenarios of social belonging through which we are invited to recognize ourselves as “men” and “women.” Who women are is a question raised by our return to the Greeks, and the context for the adjudication of that question is not the social, or the private sphere, but the domain of public speech—of politics.

To think of feminism as a tragedy is to confront the idea that difficult, even terrible things will happen in our attempts to “render patriarchy inoperative” (Honig 2021a, 12). In the Bacchae, Agave and her sisters murder the King, Pentheus, who is also Agave’s son. In Honig’s counternarrative reading of the scene, the violence the sisters commit “allegorizes the double bind” of women’s immersion in the conjugal and communal bonds “we value even though they make us unequal” (13). Overturning the patriarchy requires not only a regicide but also, inevitably, a filicide: dethroning the King means dethroning your father/husband/son/brother. The horrific violence of the sisters’ act—they dismember Pentheus with a rageful glee—makes the cruelty of the “cruel optimism” of conjugal and familial bonds spectacularly apparent (Berlant 2011). How can Agave celebrate the first murder and mourn the second? This is the bind feminists find themselves in when trying to overthrow the patriarchal system for another. To break out of our attachment to the hierarchies that subject us requires a kind of violence. Feminism as refusal will do harm—to women and to others.

Honig’s most extensive discussion of sisterhood appears in her chapter on inclination, the second of her three refusal concepts. As in her discussions of inoperativity in chapter one and fabulation in chapter three, Honig reads the Bacchae with and against a contemporary theoretical text—in this case, Adriana Cavarero’s Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude (Stanford, 2016). Unlike her divergence from Agamben in chapter one, in which she claims inoperativity for feminism by questioning his tendency towards aestheticism and purism in his celebration of Bartleby as an exemplary, lone, heroic figure of refusal for refusal’s sake, Honig’s differences with Cavarero are less pointed. Indeed, Cavarero’s more explicitly feminist concept of inclination provides Honig with the means to articulate what is absent from Agamben’s idea of inoperativity: the necessity and inevitability of being disposed to others. Where Honig differs from Cavarero is in how each figures this disposition. For Cavarero, inclination is idealized as a maternal gesture of intimacy and care towards another, whereas for Honig reading inclination in relation to the Bacchae suggests a more provocative figure: that of conspiring sisters. From an idealization of pacifism—in the figure of the caring mother—to one of agonism: “Here, an inclination reading of the Bacchae highlights the undecidably caring and murderous nature of inclination” (Honig 2021a, 59).

For Honig the “violence of politics” is “inescapable” (47). Rather than posit inclination as an idealized alternative to the verticality of patriarchal society (a world that values the autonomous “erect” individual over interdependency), Honig reorients it towards the “dirt of experience” through which the agonism of relationality is made (27). In her reading of the Bacchae inclination is literally dramatized as ambivalence: Agave inclining over her son, Pentheus, can mean grief (for his death), regret (for her violence), but it can also mean these things in addition to a desire to bury—to name and define his death—as the completion of the sisters’ act of regicide (58). The ambiguity of meaning is, for Honig, precisely where feminism becomes agonistic—the pluralization and contingency of meaning the effect of taking the risk of acting in concert with others and outside of the rule of the king or patriarchal order. The example of Agave and her sisters killing Pentheus illuminates the difficulty of acting politically. It also illustrates the difficulty of sisterhood. The egalitarianism of acting beyond social hierarchy, expectation, or script is to act with “giddiness and nausea” and without any likelihood of success (11). Emancipation is not a short term project. More often than not, in our attempts to free ourselves, we fail.

Perhaps this is the ultimate tragedy of feminism: that more often than not, it fails. As Honig notes of Agave and her sisters, their failure to kill off the king (Pentheus’ uncle, Cadmus, simply assumes the throne after his death) shows “how difficult it is to kill a king: regicide is not easy. The sisters have to do it over and over before it is done” and even then, it isn’t really done (58). But failure is not the endpoint of refusal, as Honig argues in her third and final chapter, it is a moment that demands a response. Reading Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval with the Bacchae, Honig posits fabulation as a necessary response to the failures of action. Fabulation is needed for stories of survival and “for the power to guide action” as much as it is for memory (Honig 2021a, 103). In its stories of the largely forgotten lives of working class and migrant black women in Philadelphia and New York in the early twentieth century, Wayward Lives is a book that imaginatively retells the lost lives of desiring women seeking freedom, lamenting loss, and protesting injustice in order “to conjure freedom from the past for the future” (Honig 2021a, 72). The stories Hartman tells, in other words, are a re-imagining of lives the archive did not record, or only recorded from the partial and fragmentary perspective of institutional power. Taking what the archive has to offer, Hartman “fabulates the rest,” imagining their desires and aspirations within a world that denied working class black women the space and the means to live flourishing lives (73). In doing so Hartman also speaks back to the archive. As Honig argues, while the women Hartman writes of may have lived fugitive lives, Hartman returns them to the city. By claiming the right to tell a different story about black women in the early twentieth century, Hartman reconstitutes the public sphere—she presents her stories of wayward lives as a challenge to the authority of the archive and as a counternarrative to white-supremacism. By switching perspective (from white middle-classness to black urban and migrant poor), and genre (from ethnography, police reports, and social statistics to tragedy), Hartman partakes in a “decisive making of meaning” that is fabulation as agonism.

The refusal of Hartman’s wayward women is told in the register of a tragedy, her invocation of the chorus in the last section of Wayward Lives evidence of her debt to the Greeks even as she turns to new subjects and communal forms. Perhaps here, as Honig suggests, Hartman reveals her “deep attachment” to the world even as she refuses its violent elision of black women’s lives and dreams. For Honig, Hartman’s return to the city on behalf of the women she writes of makes clear that the “contest of fabulation goes on” (132). Politics moves, its ends are endless. By asking her readers to be attentive to genre and by offering the defamiliarizing counternarrative of the Bacchae, Honig reminds us that feminism is concerned with “a decisive making of meaning”; It is about re-telling stories to change the meaning of our lives and actions and to produce new subjects for the city—something we need to keep doing, despite or because of our failures. Importantly, she also reminds us that, as a political project, feminism is not a moral, or ethical, or heroic project, but something far more messier and yes tragic: it is a collective bid for freedom that emerges from the “dirt of experience” and through the risk of action in concert with others. Ending with a return to Muhammed Ali in this context becomes, for Honig, another re-telling of what it might mean to act free of (white-settler-colonial) patriarchy. In his confrontation with and refusal of US white supremacy, Ali was “the disobedient” of his day who, through his inventiveness and unexpectedness, asserted his right to speak where he was denied that right (105). With his example Honig illuminates the possibility of sisterhood as resistance: are we going to be disobedient fabulators who take the risk of acting free with and for others?

Victoria Hesford is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University (SUNY). Her research areas include, post-1945 U.S. feminist history and culture, feminist theory, queer theory, film and media studies. She is the author of Feeling Women’s Liberation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).