What goes on when people say no? How can we theorize refusal? In this essay I hope to show the value of casting refusal not only as an instance of resistance, but also as distinct from the latter in important ways (picture a Venn diagram). In doing so, I seek to open up space for a dynamic and salutary reading of refusal and, by extension, of resistance itself. I therefore highlight refusal’s productivity—not in terms of achieved regime changes or political gains, but of what refusal does for immediate social relations. My argument starts with the assertion that refusal often begins well before said utterance or act, and extends far beyond the moment of behavioral or verbal proclamation. Moreover, in refusing, resistance—the act of standing against—is not always actually or primarily entailed. Refusal is more about avoidance than active opposition (the characteristic by which most scholars define resistance; see Hollander and Einwohner 2004): in refusal, the overt power contests, class antagonisms, or struggles for liberation or against domination that resistance entails are not necessarily directly implicated. Answering Dimitrios Theodossopoulos’s (2014) call to deprimitivize and depathologize how we think about resistant non-