Framing Female Lawyers: Women on Trial in Film

Cynthia Lucia

Published by University of Texas Press 2005

Framing Female Lawyers

Women on Trial in Film

Cynthia Lucia

https://doi.org/10.7560/706491

Overview
Contents

About this book

As real women increasingly entered the professions from the 1970s onward, their cinematic counterparts followed suit. Women lawyers, in particular, were the protagonists of many Hollywood films of the Reagan-Bush era, serving as a kind of shorthand reference any time a script needed a powerful career woman. Yet a close viewing of these films reveals contradictions and anxieties that belie the films' apparent acceptance of women's professional roles. In film after film, the woman lawyer herself effectively ends up "on trial" for violating norms of femininity and patriarchal authority.

In this book, Cynthia Lucia offers a sustained analysis of women lawyer films as a genre and as a site where other genres including film noir, maternal melodrama, thrillers, action romance, and romantic comedy intersect. She traces Hollywood representations of female lawyers through close readings of films from the 1949 Adam's Rib through films of the 1980s and 1990s, including Jagged Edge, The Accused, and The Client, among others. She also examines several key male lawyer films and two independent films, Lizzie Borden's Love Crimes and Susan Streitfeld's Female Perversions. Lucia convincingly demonstrates that making movies about women lawyers and the law provides unusually fertile ground for exploring patriarchy in crisis. This, she argues, is the cultural stimulus that prompts filmmakers to create stories about powerful women that simultaneously question and undermine women's right to wield authority.

Author / Editor information

Cynthia Lucia is professor of Media Arts (Film and Television) at Rider University in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. She also serves on the editorial board of Cineaste magazine.

Reviews

This book shows how the professional woman of popular film has so often been given a half measure of authority and agency in narratives which, though they may register patriarchal crisis, are also deeply dedicated to patriarchal restoration. Lucia convincingly illustrates how the female lawyer's status as a figure with access to the public sphere and to the law most often necessitates that she herself will be interrogated and put on trial.

— Diane Negra

The book asks important questions about the seemingly taken for granted quality of feminist perspectives on gender and work, about the ways in which both the codes of law and those of genre "frame" the female lawyer, and about the persistence of anxious constructions of successful women.

— Cineaste

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
INTRODUCTION Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
CHAPTER 1 The Law Is the Law Adam’s Rib and The Verdict Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	27
APTER 2 Father Knows Best Female Lawyers as Daughters in Music Box and Class Action Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	46
CHAPTER 3 Female Lawyers and the Maternal The Client and Defenseless Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	82
CHAPTER 4 A Question of Genre Jagged Edge and Guilty as Sin Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	102
CHAPTER 5 Female Power and Masculine Crisis Investigation, Action, and Romance Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	128
CHAPTER 6 Genre, Gender, and Law The Female Lawyer Narrative and Its Influence Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	155
CHAPTER 7 Feminist Address and Spectatorship in The Accused, Love Crimes, and Female Perversions Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171
CONCLUSION. Female Lawyers in the Twenty-First Century Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	227
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	237
FILMOGRAPHY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	249
BIBLIOGRAPHY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	251
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	257

Language: English
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 283

eBook

Published: January 1, 2010
ISBN: 9780292797031