In this political moment when the voices of women and feminized subjects are refused by authorities in electoral politics, the courts, and broader culture across the world, this dissertation, Voices of Authority: On Staging the Politics of Exclusion from Sophocles to Simone de Beauvoir, offers insights into the meaningful potential of voice. Building on works in contemporary and feminist political theory, as well as feminist scholarship in classics, and analyzing enactments of voice embedded in contexts of performance, this dissertation engages with questions of critique, judgment, and authority. Analyzing the poetic and aesthetic affordances of voice, I argue that performances of voice are neither disempowered nor re-inscribed into patriarchal regimes of legibility, but rather enactments of ambiguous refusal. Ambiguous refusal is a double gesture with which women inhabit the frames of patriarchal authorities with a view to turning away from them. I articulate a politics of ambiguous refusal by analyzing how the women in these plays say ‘no,’ re-make audiences, un-make patriarchal authority, and re-signify the meanings attached to their voices and their bodies. Through novel readings of Hélène Cixous’s Portrait de Dora, Euripides’ Hecuba, Sophocles’ Ajax, and Simone de Beauvoir’s Les bouches inutiles. I argue that voice, in both silence and speech, is a mode of political action that un-makes patriarchal power and transforms it into a vision of democratic authority depending on collective self-authorship.