The Force of Laughter and a Minor Jurisprudence of Refusal: A Question of Silence (Marleen Gorris, 1982)

Marleen Gorris’ feminist classic A Question of Silence (1982) features what may be one of the most powerful fictional court scenes ever filmed, offering us an occasion to think through modes and gestures of feminist refusal: an extended scene of wild laughter that grows and grows to eventually engulf all the women in the courtroom. There are other scenes: a 15th century image depicting Calefurnia as it pops up in Julie Stone Peter’s Law as Performance; the bacchants in ecstasy tearing apart the son/king as figured in Bonnie Honig’s reading of Euripides’s play in A Feminist Theory of Refusal; Nancy Spero’s Sheela na gigs. Juxtaposing these and yet other scenes, this essay returns to critical legal themes of rupture and minor jurisprudence in an attempt to further populate the feminist heterotopia that is the elsewhere of law’s mediation. Something of a counter-forum emerges in the collective laughter of A Question of Silence, but where and what is it?