Framing female lawyers : women on trial in film / Cynthia Lucia.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lucia, Cynthia A. Barto (Cynthia Anne Barto)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women lawyers in motion pictures.

Justice, Administration of, in motion pictures.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (284 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Austin : University of Texas Press, 2005.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1 The Law Is the Law

APTER 2 Father Knows Best

CHAPTER 3 Female Lawyers and the Maternal

CHAPTER 4 A Question of Genre

CHAPTER 5 Female Power and Masculine Crisis

CHAPTER 6 Genre, Gender, and Law

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

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Filmography: p. [249]-250.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [251]-256) and index.

ISBN:

0-292-79703-6

OCLC:

191818299