Book Review: A Feminist Theory of Refusal, by Bonnie Honig

Abstract

the fact that this series involved the revisitation of its documentary subjects at seven-year intervals—that “Unlike a map, which renders a physical landscape as a physical replica, there is really no danger that film will ever perfectly represent its object—at least not when its object is a subject—for the subjectivity of persons, although a phenomenon of duration like film, is not a phenomenon of the same nature” (121). The imperfection of cinematic representation is not, as Dienstag makes clear, an occasion for special concern, merely pessimism—but only insofar as pessimism implies that in film, just as in representative democracies, we do not always get what we want. Or when we get what we want, we have to give up a little of something else that might matter to us so that others can have something, but not all, of what they want or need, too. And if what we give up, ultimately, is the narcissistic satisfaction that follows from, or compels, a belief that what appears, appears just for us, what, exactly, will we be missing out on?