Bouclin on Women in Prison Movies as Feminist Jurisprudence @sbouclin @utpjournals

ICYMI:

Suzanne Bouclin, University of Ottawa, Common Law Section, has published Women in Prison Movies as Feminist Jurisprudence, at 21 Canadian Journal of Women and the Law (2010). Here is the abstract.

In comparison to the significant body of research around audience reception and generic conventions of, as well as the progressive or regressive assumptions behind and the legal meaning-making potentialities within, prison movies, women in prison movies (WIPs) have received far less theoretical or critical attention. This is noteworthy from a feminist law and society perspective that aims to link questions of popular culture to broader issues of gendered social stratification and social conflict. On one level, WIPs can be read as an overt critique of the masculinism of the prison genre. In the traditional prison movies, women appear in flashback sequences as supportive wives, girlfriends, mothers, and/or deceitful vixens that coerce, frame, or seduce men into lives of crime. In WIPs, female characters move from the margins of the story to its centre. On another level, WIPs problematize broader legal, economic, and political apparatuses that operate to criminalize women without the well-rehearsed and recognizable markers of social power. They invite viewers to look beyond abstracted statistics about female “criminality” through believable – though not exactly realistic – accounts of the manner in which the law operates to criminalize particular women.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Freedom, Power, and the Control of Women in "Vertigo"

John (Jay) Steinmetz, University of Oregon, has published 'They Had the Power and the Freedom': A Genealogy of Patriarchal Violence in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo as an APSA 2011 Annual Meeting Paper. Here is the abstract.

The control of women is at the center of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, a misogyny of domination that is easily apparent. Less apparent in previous literature on Vertigo is the connection to a history of violence against women that threads through key scenes, where the expression "the freedom and the power" is spoken by the wife-murderer Gavin Elster, an authority on San Francisco history, and John "Scottie" Ferguson, who stalks and obsesses over what becomes three women: Madeleine Elster, Carlotta Valdez, and Judy Barton. The freedom and the power is something men once had, but they are slowly losing it, and there emerges the paranoia, the real vertigo. This phrase and its connotation, that of controlling women, connects both freedom and power to the mechanisms of patriarchy. One such mechanism in Vertigo is the deployment, in Foucaultian terms, of a myth: that Carlotta Valdez, thrown away by a rich man nearly 100 years ago, haunts Gavin Elster's wife Madeleine. This myth, the spurned woman, covers up the darker violence underneath, that of uxoricide. Foucault's repressive hypothesis, a deployment in discourse on the freedom and power of sexuality, can be mapped onto the myth of Carlotta Valdez and the killing of women that lies below its surface.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.