Entertainment and profit constitute the driving forces behind most popular representations of incarcerated women. Some cinematic representations, however, and the women-in-prison genre especially, can generate complex legal meanings and leave viewers feeling unsettled about women’s incarceration. Focusing on five exemplary films and one television series, from 1933 to the present, Women, Film, and Law asks how fictional representations explore, shape, and refine beliefs about women’s incarceration. Suzanne Bouclin convincingly argues that popular depictions of women’s prisons can illuminate multiple forms of marginalization and oppression experienced by women in conflict with the law.

Suzanne Bouclin's profile page

Suzanne Bouclin is an associate professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa. She has published in both French and English in a wide array of periodicals, including the Canadian Journal of Women in the Law, Public Law, the Canadian Journal of Law and Society, and the e-journal Literature, History of Ideas, Images and Societies of the English-Speaking World.

An excellent analysis of the social significance of the women-in-prison genre.

Criminal Law and Criminal Justice