Framing Female Lawyers: Women on Trial in Film / Edition 1

by Cynthia Lucia

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780292706507
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	05/15/2005
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	283
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Law Is the Law: Adam's Rib and The Verdict
• Chapter 2. Father Knows Best: Female Lawyers as Daughters in Music Box and Class Action
• Chapter 3. Female Lawyers and the Maternal: The Client and Defenseless
• Chapter 4. A Question of Genre: Jagged Edge and Guilty as Sin
• Chapter 5. Female Power and Masculine Crisis: Genre Hybrids and Dual-Focus Narratives
• Chapter 6. Genre, Gender, and Law: The Female Lawyer Narrative and Its Influence
• Chapter 7. Feminist Address and Spectatorship in The Accused, Love Crimes, and Female Perversions
• Conclusion: Female Lawyers in the Twenty-First Century
• Notes
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index

What People are Saying About This

Diane Negra

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, University of East Anglia, author of Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom

Editorial Reviews

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

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 - Yvonne Tasker