The Force of Laughter and a Minor Jurisprudence of Refusal

Marleen Gorris’s feminist classic A Question of Silence (1982) features what may be one of the most memorable court scenes ever filmed: an extended scene of wild laughter that grows and grows to eventually engulf all the women in the courtroom. The scene offers an occasion to think through modes and gestures of feminist refusal. There are other scenes: a fifteenth-century image depicting Calefurnia as it pops up in Julie Stone Peters’ Law as Performance ; the bacchants in ecstasy tearing apart the son/king as figured in Bonnie Honig’s reading of Euripides’ play in A Feminist Theory of Refusal ; Nancy Spero’s Sheela na gigs… Juxtaposing these and yet other scenes, this chapter 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.