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.