Return to the City to Claim It: Temporalities and Locations of Feminist Refusal

Abstract

One of the main contributions of A Feminist Theory of Refusal is its connection of everyday action and prefigurative practices with an explicit commitment to structural change. But how such change happens, and what kind of relations it implies between ‘the city’ (as the existing political community) and feminist heterotopias of refusal, remains unclear. Reading Honig’s work as a prefigurative theory, I argue that it links moments of doing-otherwise with moments of institutional politics, sparking questions about the conditions of a successful return to the city. I then develop these conditions through a case study of the feminist activism of Women on Waves; and argue that feminist refusal can lead to political transformation if it durably connects practices inside and outside the city.