Event contact Rachel Finch

Speaker: Anja Louis (Languages & Cultures – SBS)

Title: Female Lawyers as epithets of powerful career women: From Saénz de Heredia to González Sinde

Representations of female lawyers are often seen as personifications of progress and indicative of wider issues of patriarchal crisis. They are also often perceived as epithets of powerful career women and hence their symbolic function goes beyond the realm of the law. This paper gives a brief overview of female lawyers from early examples in Saenz de Heredia films, to the female lawyer in Anillo de oro/Wedding Rings (1983), to more recent representations in TV series, examining in what way the public/private, law/justice, reason/emotion dichotomies are played out in female lawyers’ public performances and private lives.

The second part of the paper offers a close reading of the female lawyer in La suerte dormida/Sleeping Luck, whose personal tragedy encourages her to become a heroine lawyer for the socially disadvantaged. It explores a female filmmaker’s representation of a woman lawyer fighting for a lost cause (González Sinde 2004) and examines how she reconciles her moral reasoning with conflicting demands and obligations of her profession.