Ava Shirazi (Haverford College)
How does Greek tragedy move us (both literally and figuratively) towards action? How does it perform a politics of the body which also reimagines the body politic?
In a Feminist Theory of Refusal, Bonnie Honig elevates Euripides’ Bacchae beyond the status of a play and towards a theoretical (and at times pragmatic) model of refusal: a Bacchic reading and Bacchic doing of “what is needed to render patriarchy inoperative” (2021: 12). Honig enhances and combines three contemporary critical notions of refusal—“inoperativity” (Agamben), “inclination” (Cavarero), and “fabulation” (Hartman)—through a reading of the
Bacchae’s female collective who, as she demonstrates, embody a physical and psychic mode of radical dissent.
My response to Honig’s work begins by isolating the thematic, conceptual, and ideological significance of the body—and more specifically, of gesture—across the book’s three chapters. Corporeal movement and pose emerge as the critical limb that holds together Honig’s analysis and amalgamation of Agamben, Cavarero and Hartman. Through the three theorists and the Bacchae, Honig creates a feminist corporeal figure whose bodily formation and intensification, whose connectivity with other bodies around her, and whose gesture and gait, move us towards a politics of refusal. Put differently, Honig’s feminist theory of refusal is simultaneously a feminist reclaiming of lost gestures and as such a mode of dissent that is at once visceral and visual.
As my paper begins to elucidate the role bodies and gestures play in Honig’s feminist resistance to power, it also turns to the implications of this form of corporeal activism for subjects whose bodies are disenfranchised and displaced. Drawing on vignettes in Greek tragedy, especially on Euripidean works outside of the Bacchae (e.g. Hecuba, Trojan Women) I explore the tragic staging of displaced (or soon-to-be displaced) female subjects whose positionality maps on to political parallels in modernity. I will elucidate how these women’s gestures, as they are imagined via the text, complicate the corporeality of Honig’s feminist refusal: unlike the Bacchic women, their “gait” (Chapter Three) turns them away from their cities and towards one from which they can never return. Here, I will work through Honig’s Bacchic reading of Hartman’s notion of fabulation and further question the bidirectional model of refuge and return for the displaced. Then, turning to the positions of these women as enslaved (or soon-to-be enslaved), I will show how the constant threat of their effacement and erasure from the historical records is also explored by Euripides through explicit references to visual gesture and pose. Thus, I will ask whether Honig’s feminist theory of refusal can also be a recuperative mode of working against archival loss: that is, whether refusal can also recover the performances and actualities of bodies on the brink of extinction, and whether Honig’s intensification of the body can further elucidate the already elusive glimpses of their gestures in Greek drama.