This dissertation examines some twenty American films that feature female lawyers as protagonists, appearing with regularity from 1985 through the 1990s. The films register two contradictory currents within contemporaneous American culture: a heightened feminist awareness of women's position within patriarchy and male-dominated institutions; and Reaganite New Right/neo-conservative ideology advocating a return to traditional family values, as expressed in backlash attitudes towards women and the feminist agenda. Although representing independent, professional women as protagonists, the female lawyer film paradoxically displaces female narrative agency and legal authority, in effect placing female lawyers on trial. Interrogating the female lawyer's professionalism by way of her personal choices, emotional stability and sexuality, the films inscribe the public/private dichotomy upheld by law, constructing rigid gender role definitions.
This dissertation defines the relatively consistent structure, themes and representational codes that situate female lawyers in American films of the 1980s and 1990s. Chapter one contextualizes the female lawyer film in terms of mid-1980s American politics and ideology, tracing historical attitudes toward independent women from the post World War II era. Adam's Rib (1949) and The Verdict (1983) are here examined as precursors of the contemporary female lawyer film. Chapter two explores patriarchy and phallocentrism as read through feminist legal and feminist film theories. Hanna K . (1983), Music Box (1990), Defenseless (1991), Class Action (1991) and The Client (1994) are shown to inscribe both patriarchal authority and patriarchal crisis, often through the convergence of maternal melodrama and film noir elements. Chapter three uses genre theory to define eleven female lawyer films as hybridized forms of the psychological thriller, the investigative/action/romance, and the romantic comedy, respectively. This chapter contextualizes the films through a brief examination of 1920s and 1930s female lawyer films and classic and contemporary male lawyer films. Chapter four examines spectatorship and feminist address in The Accused (1988), Love Crimes (1992), Female Perversions (1997), and A Question of Silence (1982), a Dutch film about a female court psychiatrist. These films provide concluding points of comparison and contrast with the ostensibly liberal politics of other contemporary female lawyer films produced in Hollywood.
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