Hope as Refusal

Queer, Feminist Futurity

Bibliographic Data

ID2230002
AuthorsRachel Silverbloom (Women's and Gender Studies et Recherches Féministes, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume49
Issue4
Pages807-830
Publication date2024-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSigns: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0097-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-6943
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/729910
OpenAlexW4400446159
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited14

Lived experience and the critical work of feminist and queer scholars across disciplines have shown that political hope—which, at face value, signals optimism about the possibility of social transformation—often disappoints due to the concealment of an underlying complicity with the status quo and its structuring violence. In the face of these failures, ought we reject hope altogether and embrace negativity and refusal, as Lee Edelman suggests in No Future? Rejecting the common binary opposition between hope and refusal, this article instead coins and proposes the practice of “hope as refusal.” To employ hope as refusal, I argue, requires rejecting inevitability in all its forms, including the naively hopeful belief that “progress” is inevitable and the complacently hopeless belief that the violence of the present is inevitable. Instead, I draw from queer women of color and Black feminisms to argue for the inseparability of refusing the world of our present and striving for the possibility of other worlds and futures that do not merely perpetuate it. I turn to Saidiya Hartman’s writings, as well as her work as a founding member of the Practicing Refusal Collective, as illuminating examples of projects shaped by hope as refusal

Queer · Sociology · Transgender · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Race, History, and American Society

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