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Critical Perspectives on Gender and Judging

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 September 2010

Sally J. Kenney
Sally J. Kenney
Affiliation:
Newcomb College Institute and Political Science, Tulane University
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Extract

I began to write this essay as confirmation hearings opened for President Barack Obama's nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, and long before he nominated Elena Kagan. The nominations have made the gender and ethnic identities of judges and senators alike salient. In their opening statements, senators burst with pride about a great country where anyone can achieve anything, regardless of gender, class, or ethnicity, while some equated empathy with prejudice and difference with partiality. In a New York Times Magazine interview the Sunday before, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg stressed the importance of more women on the bench (Bazelon 2009). Opponents' carefully orchestrated media attacks against Sotomayor, arguing that she lacked judicial temperament (too mean) and was racist, came straight from the misogynist playbook well thumbed from Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. I share Nancy Maveety's disappointment that the hearings squelched, rather than explored, the questions of what Martha Minow (1987) has so aptly named “the dilemma of difference”—how women can be both equal to and different from men—and the nature of judging, which has to do with how one's social location and life experiences inevitably shape judgment. The dullness of the actual hearings stood in sharp contrast to the euphoria in the Latino community where many sported the latest fashion: “Wise Latina Woman” T-shirts, dispelling any doubt about the symbolic importance of such appointments.

Type
Critical Perspectives on Gender and Politics
Information
Politics & Gender , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , September 2010 , pp. 433 - 441
Copyright
Copyright © The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2010

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