April 2025

Mary Somerville and Sofia Kovalevskaya lived vastly different lives but shared a powerful thread: their lives were shaped by decisions to resist the roles assigned to them. These decisions were not grand revolutions, but deliberate acts of reorientation—what political theorist Bonnie Honig has configured as the arc of refusal.  This arc, unfolding in three movements—inoperativity, inclination, and fabulation—offers a way to understand refusal not as withdrawal, but as a creative, relational act of making life otherwise.

Somerville’s refusal was quiet but resonant: abstaining from sugar to protest slavery, signing petitions for women’s suffrage, donating her scientific library to Girton College. These were acts that disrupted the domestic rituals of empire and reimagined what counted as civic life. Kovalevskaya’s refusals were bolder in form: a fictitious marriage to circumvent Russian travel restrictions, participation in revolutionary networks, and literary fictions that challenged the expectations placed upon women in science and politics.

But refusal did not end at disruption. Both women returned to public life with renewed demands. Somerville became a household name in scientific publishing; Kovalevskaya, the first woman in modern Europe to hold a university chair in mathematics. Their gestures—dispersed across tea tables, lecture halls, and transnational correspondence—show us how scientific life and political life were never separate.

This month, I have been thinking and writing about the intertwined lives of Mary Somerville and Sofia Kovalevskaya, and how refusal, for them, was never simply a matter of saying no. It was a generative gesture—a way of making space for what did not yet exist, for what remained inchoate or still coming into view. Their refusals were not rejections in the conventional sense but acts of inoperativity and imaginative deferral, attuned to shared inclinations and the work of fabulation, as Bonnie Honig so beautifully theorizes. In choosing not to comply, not to conform, they did more than resist; they unsettled and refigured the very grounds on which science, politics, and participation could be conceived. Their lives remind us that refusal is not an endpoint but a point of departure—a tilt toward other ways of thinking, living, and relating that are still unfolding. There is still much work to be done in tracing the genealogies of these entanglements—between gender, mathematics, and politics—not as separate domains intersecting, but as deeply co-constitutive fields, where forms of knowledge, expression, and dissent have always been in dialogue.