The Inoperative Refusal: Gestures and How the Unruly Body Goes on Strike

ABSTRACT This paper advances a way of thinking the body in human geography through gestures, their capacity to refuse inoperatively and their relation to unconscious processes. Extending insights from non‐representational and embodied approaches to gestures in the field, it treats gestures as a distinct analytic and develops the concept of ‘inoperative refusal’ to account for how unconscious, corporeal practices interrupt axes of bodily discipline and surveillance without becoming intentional or representational forms of resistance. Through gestures, the body refuses. Drawing on a psychoanalytic reading of gestures via the work of Donald Winnicott, the paper reclaims the unconscious for the body and situates queer gestures as instances of the inoperative refusal. To examine how such refusal might operate collectively, I place it in dialogue with Herbert Marcuse's ‘Great Refusal’ (1955) and Maurice Blanchot's ‘pure means’ refusal (2010), which offer resources for thinking refusal towards non‐programmatic forms of collective action. Moving beyond intentionality and negativity, I suggest that the inoperative refusal resides in ambiguity and indeterminacy, not the oppositional. The inoperative refusal affirms the open‐endedness of the horizon of becoming while inviting a rethinking of solidarity as that which already takes place in the everyday attunement of bodies in gestures, where feelings of kinship and shared worlding may unexpectedly arise and exceed political identification.