Abstract
This Essay offers a model for systematic application of "feminist law and film" methodology to investigating the imagery of law and justice; to reexamining the relationship between feminist theory that focuses on an ethics of care and feminist theory that focuses on dominance, oppression, and resistance; and to reviewing the relationship between legal feminism and postmodernity. More specifically, employing interdisciplinary methodology, the Essay explores the imagery of a newly developing legal feminist concept, "caring justice," by focusing on popular cultural images of the judiciary as presented by the film industry. Offering a close reading of a contemporary film, Pedro Almodovar's High Heels, the Essay reveals how the film offers a radical and feminist alternative to that of Solomonic justice, which dominates our Judeo-Christian heritage. In High Heels, law, embodied in the image of a male judge in drag, is both motherly and fatherly, son and lover, subjective and caring, and above all thoroughly humane and differently just. This Essay argues that the film's imagery of judge and law suggestively expands our contemporary pantheon of images of the judiciary.
Recommended Citation
Orit Kamir,
Feminist Law and Film: Imagining Judges and Justice,
75
Chi.-Kent L. Rev.
899
(2000).
Available at:
https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cklawreview/vol75/iss3/13
