Feminist Arrivals: The Arc of Refusal and the Right to (Leave) the City
Abstract
The paper discusses the three stations of an arc of refusal elaborated in Bonnie Honig’s recent book A Feminist Theory of Refusal (2021). Asking why a feminist refusal needs to return to the city, the paper claims a right to leave the city without returning. The critique reads Honig’s recent book in the light of former publications, especially Honig’s Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics from 1993. It shows how a thinking of the ambivalence between settlement and unsettlement shapes Honig’s works throughout the years which we also find in the recent book on feminist refusal – a refusal that unsettles the city’s infrastructures, beliefs, ideas, and figurations of settlement and security. With and against Honig’s theory of refusal, I argue that refusal provides a feminist tool to question the privileges of settlement. However, refusals and refusers do not need to return to the city to qualify as feminist.
Downloads
Article download
Crossmark
License
In order to support the global exchange of knowledge, the journal Res Publica. Revista de Historia de las Ideas Políticas is allowing unrestricted access to its content as from its publication in this electronic edition, and as such it is an open-access journal. The originals published in this journal are the property of the Complutense University of Madrid and any reproduction thereof in full or in part must cite the source. All content is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 use and distribution licence (CC BY 4.0). This circumstance must be expressly stated in these terms where necessary. You can view the summary and the complete legal text of the licence.
