Bonnie Honig Lecture: Bartleby or the Bacchae? A Feminist Theory of Refusal

The Institute for the Humanities welcomes 2018-2019 Visiting Fellow Bonnie Honig, Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Political Science, Brown University.

She will present a lecture on March 5:

Bartleby or the Bacchae? A Feminist Theory of Refusal

“Where’s your spine?” we often say to those who seem to lack moral ‘backbone.’ How do such vertical metaphors limit and drive our imagination of refusal? Drawing on Adriana Cavarero’s work, Inclination, this lecture develops a postural analysis of refusal in the Antigone, the Bacchae, Thoreau’s “Walking”, and Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the Madonna. Cavarero promotes inclination (the leaning in posture of maternal care) as the preferred posture for her ethics and politics. This lecture pluralizes the feminist subject position of inclination to include sorority, as well, and argues that the refusals we find in maternal and sororal care express not only love but rage, and promise not only the holding of community but also the dismemberment of revolution/new beginning.

See full readings for her fellowship here:
https://huminst.uic.edu/ifth/events/visiting-fellow/2018-2019/preparing-for-bonnie-honigs-visiting-fellowship

Please register for this event at huminst@uic.edu.