Framing female lawyers [[electronic resource] ] : women on trial in film / / Cynthia Lucia

• Autore: Lucia Cynthia A. Barto (Cynthia Anne Barto)
• Pubblicazione: Austin, : University of Texas Press, 2005
• Edizione: 1st ed.
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (284 p.)
• Disciplina: 791.43/6554
• Soggetto topico: Women lawyers in motion pictures; Justice, Administration of, in motion pictures
• Note generali: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph
• Nota di bibliografia: Filmography: p. [249]-250.; Includes bibliographical references (p. [251]-256) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: 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
• Sommario/riassunto: 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.
• Titolo autorizzato: Framing female lawyers
• ISBN: 0-292-79703-6
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Record Nr.: 9910777675603321
• Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II