A feminist theory of refusal

In A Feminist Theory of Refusal, Bonnie Honig provides a creative re-reading of Euripides’ Bacchae to generate a new understanding of refusal. Against the common definition of refusal as a withdrawal from the world, Honig conceptualizes refusal as a form of world-building. ‘Even when refusal seems to reject the world’, Honig writes, ‘it betrays a deep attachment to it, if not the world as it is, then surely to a more just world that is not yet’ (p. 3). Tracing the bacchants’ arc of refusal in the play, Honig identifies three stages: first, enchanted by Dionysus, genderbending god of pleasure, intoxication, and the festival, the women flee the city, abandoning their work in the home; second, the bacchants establish a community on the hills of Cithaeron, where they eventually dismember the king, Pentheus; third, led by Agave, Pentheus’ mother, the women return to reclaim the city, only to find the male citizens unwilling to welcome them. In the last stage especially, Honig sees the potential for world-building in the bacchants’ effort to bring their alternate ways of living, developed in the heterotopia on Cithaeron, home. The bacchants’ world-building, however, requires the slow regicide of Pentheus, which Honig heralds as the destruction of sovereignty, patriarchy, and even kinship. Feminist refusal as world-building, Honig suggests, requires violence.