Refusal is power: claiming space
March 11, 2026
Sheena Igbiri reflects on silence, refusal and bodily autonomy
What happens when a woman simply stops?
Stops explaining.
Stops pleasing.
Stops participating.
We’re used to stories about women fighting back loudly. We celebrate ambition, resilience, confidence. But what about refusal? What about opting out?
‘Your silence will not protect you,’ Audre Lorde reminds us, sometimes refusing to participate, to please, or to perform is itself a radical act of power.
I personally feel: To say I love you, is to say, I do not understand you, and I will not force understanding. For in letting one be, you accept a will beyond your own ethical comfort, you accept even your own interpretation it seems can be extractive and so you embody a silence not to be cured or aestheticised. Love requires an oscillation between intervention and distance beyond your want and desire. You learn that there is a meadow beyond action and inaction known as decreation, and it is here that love thrives.
I’ve been reading Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, a South Korean novel about Yeong-Hye, the protagonist, who quietly refuses to participate in the social and cultural expectations placed upon her. She begins by rejecting meat and gradually withdraws from other parts of life, silently resisting a world that demands compliance.
Yeong-Hye’s refusal escalates: From meat to sex, to speech, to food, to humanity itself
My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a novel by American author Ottessa Moshfegh, is the Western cousin to The Vegetarian. Its narrator also chooses to withdraw from the world, actively stepping back from life on her own terms. Both novels explore similar themes of withdrawal and refusal, asking: what if, instead of becoming more, the most radical act is becoming less?
Both protagonists seek erasure without suicide. Neither wants healing, meaning, or growth. They want non-experience. The difference is Moshfegh’s narrator has autonomy and so her withdrawal is framed as ‘self-care’ or satire. Whereas Yeong-Hye does not, her withdrawal is medicalised and punished.
Yeong-Hye’s refusal escalates: From meat → to sex → to speech → to food → to humanity itself. She refuses narration entirely. Her silence is not a message that wants decoding. It is a withdrawal from narrative itself. A being that does not answer is ungovernable. Institutions, family, medicine, art, ethics, exist to extract response. Yeong-Hye’s silence refuses extraction.
So, it is reclassified as illness, danger, and tragedy. Narrative rushes in to seal the breach. This is unsettling, as although most narratives restore dignity through narration and dialogue, Han Kang refuses the reader that consolation.
The question then becomes, why is Moshfegh’s protagonist afforded better treatment? Well because she can quite literally afford it. Moshfegh’s protagonist has money, private space, and access to doctors without coercion, therefore she has the ability to frame her absence as ‘a choice’. Her non-experience becomes ‘self-care’.
Whereas Yeong-Hye has no economic autonomy, no private language and no control over medical intervention. Her non-experience is deviance. Same impulse. Different institutional readings. This is because Yeong-Hye’s refusal inconveniences. Yeong-Hye disrupts the institution of marriage and filial hierarchy, so she must be ‘corrected’.
Silence in the face of violence can be refusal. Not speaking or responding is not consent. It is escape
This is further compounded in Yeong-Hye’s non-engagement with her husband following the occasions on which he rapes her. It is consistent with her total withdrawal from address and illustrates silence as a refusal to acknowledge the incident itself. Rape, culturally and narratively, demands certain things from the victim such as articulation and reaction.
Yeong-Hye gives none of these. By not speaking, not narrating, not even internally framing the violation, she refuses to let the act become a story. This is radical. Yeong-Hye’s dignity does not come from reclaiming the event.
It comes from withdrawing herself from the economy in which events demand response. She quite literally said “aired bro” and it’s powerful!
What makes the assault uniquely disturbing is that it is framed as mutual transcendence and later interpreted for her. However, her silence exposes the lie at the heart of her husband’s self-story. He believes she ‘consented’ because she did not resist narratively.
But non-address is not consent. It is the opposite, it is absence from the field in which consent is even intelligible. It is escape.
Was she silent or silenced? The answer is both, simultaneously, and the horror is that they become indistinguishable.
Yeong-Hye:
• is never a narrator
• Her husband speaks over her
• Doctors restrain her body
• Her father strikes her
• The artist frames her without asking
• Even her sister speaks for her
Love requires extending care without domination and respecting another’s autonomy
Language, medicine, family, art. She is consistently stripped of the conditions under which speech could matter. She is systematically silenced. Silence is often framed as lack; however, within that silencing, Yeong-Hye expresses her autonomy and chooses to act. Action without narrative threatens power. Institutions can argue with words, but it is much more difficult to argue with action.
Don’t save her: Yeong-Hye doesn’t want to be saved. Her refusal resonates with Simone Weil, the French philosopher and activist, who, as early as the 1930s-40s, described a process she called decreation to describe a kind of love: the deliberate undoing of the ego, stepping aside so completely that one does not impose oneself on others or the world at all. Decreation, as Weil described, is not self-hatred or suicide, but a freely chosen withdrawal from asserting ‘I’ at the centre of existence.
Yeong-Hye’s desire to become plant-like resembles Weil’s idea of decreation. She wants to exist without being a social self, but she lives in a world that does not respect autonomy, so her withdrawal is treated as illness and forcibly managed.
bell hooks’ (feminist writer) idea of love would require others to respect Yeong-Hye’s boundaries and not dominate her, which might have made her withdrawal safer; instead, without that kind of love, her attempt to step back from selfhood turned into punishment and erasure.
In All About Love, hooks defines love not as feeling, attachment, or care, but as: ‘The will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.’ This means love, for hooks, requires care without domination. This immediately exposes what’s happening in The Vegetarian.
Young-Hye is never loved. Everyone claims to love her. No one practices love, as bell hooks defines it. What Yeong-Hye experiences instead is attachment without respect. Hooks would say the world fails Yeong-Hye not because it is cruel, but because it is attached. Attachment says: ‘I need you to be a certain way for my stability.’ Whereas love says: ‘I respect your self-definition, even when it destabilises me.’ No character in The Vegetarian can tolerate destabilisation, and so the natural next step becomes to disdain what you do not understand.
Sometimes saying nothing, doing nothing, is the boldest feminist act.
