Women in Prison Movies as Feminist Jurisprudence

Abstract

Engagement with “women-in-prison” movies (WIPs), which are a relatively obscure and certainly under-read genre, can provide the impetus for the revision of law through a feminist lens. I do not propose that WIPs reveal anything about the actual conditions of incarcerated women. Clearly, they vary in their cultural verisimilitude. Yet, these fictional stories often leave us feeling unsettled about prisons and about the women who are warehoused within them. Accordingly, rather than measuring the realism of WIPs, I examine the dialogical relationship between these representations of women in prison and the manner in which formalized legal institutions and official legal agents label particular women “criminals.” I have found that some WIPs may offer ways to imagine the violence of state and legal practices and the inhumanity of total institutions to suggest broader gender, race, and class injustices that render particular women more vulnerable to criminalization and incarceration. Some WIPs reproduce the gendered operations and assumptions of the criminal law while also challenging its institutions and apparatuses of power. I argue that Caged (1950), in particular, invites viewers to think through contemporary feminist concerns around the criminalization of women. By virtue of its discursive determinations, normative dimensions, and inter-textual references, Caged is feminist jurisprudence.