Figures of dissent: Women, mathematics, and the politics of refusal

This paper examines the entangled relationships between mathematics, politics, and gender through the lives of two nineteenth-century women mathematicians, Mary Somerville and Sofia Kovalevskaya, using Bonnie Honig's (2021) ‘arc of refusal’ as a plane of analysis. By exploring their political and intellectual trajectories, I argue that their acts of refusal—whether in resisting prescribed gender roles, challenging institutional norms, or defying exclusionary scientific practices—illustrate how refusal operates as a dynamic, relational, and open-ended political and epistemic practice. I suggest that their refusals were not merely acts of personal defiance but gestures that re-imagined the boundaries of science and politics, creating new spaces for engagement and participation. Through this lens, Somerville and Kovalevskaya's lives reveal the intricate ways in which mathematical inquiry, political activism, and gender intersect, and how their refusals continue to reverberate in contemporary struggles over knowledge, power, and representation.