A Minor Jurisprudence of Refusal: A Question of Silence (dir. Marleen Gorris, 1982)

Film screening and talk with Başak Ertür (Goldsmiths, University of London) as part of the Critical Times summer school Disruptions

 

Date: 2 July 2025
Time: 17.30 h to 20.30 h
Location: Stattkino, Lucerne

Marleen Gorris’ feminist classic A Question of Silence (1982) features what may be one of the most memorable court scenes ever filmed, offering us an occasion to think through modes and gestures of feminist refusal. 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; and perhaps also Nancy Spero’s Sheela na gigs... Juxtaposing these and yet other scenes, this talk returns to critical legal themes of disruption, rupture, and minor jurisprudence in an attempt to further populate a feminist heterotopia that is the elsewhere of law’s mediation.

Başak Ertur is a Reader at the Centre for Research Architecture (CRA) at Goldsmiths and a Research Fellow at Forensic Architecture. Prior to joining the CRA, she taught at Birkbeck Law School for over a decade. Her work is engaged with questions of legal violence, legal performativity, and more broadly with law's epistemologies and aesthetics. She has published articles and book chapters on a range of topics including: conceptualising and studying state violence; academic freedom in the War on Terror; genocide denialism and memory laws; filmic representations of transgender bodies before the law; counter-monumental practices of resistance; conspiracy theories and the law; the ‘deep state’; and on Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay ‘Toward the Critique of Violence.’Her book Spectacles and Specters: A Performative Theory of Political Trials (2022) was awarded the 2024 SLSA Socio-Legal Theory and History Prize.

Registration free but mandatory via lucernaiuris@unilu.ch.