Visions of Vindication: Law, Affect, and the Intimate Public of Judge Judy

Abstract

Drawing upon ethnographic research in a New England homeless shelter, “Visions of Vindication” uses the television show Judge Judy as a vehicle to explore the relationship of a group of older homeless women—and through them, poor women generally in the United States—with the justice system and with the state. The women whose lives are herein explored adored Judge Judy; they watched her staged courtroom religiously, even reverently. At the same time, however, their own lives were lived far outside the sociopolitical order of the state; they were often asked by the justice system to account for themselves, but rarely if ever did it give them an opportunity to demand such an accounting from another. Judge Judy, the article argues, offered these women an affective space of feminine belonging and a projected vision of vindication in the space of the courtroom and thus at the hands of the state; in short, it offered them a vision of a place within the sociopolitical order. Yet this vision of affective belonging and legal vindication ultimately depoliticized women’s interactions with the state, assisting in the construction of a feminine legal consciousness that discouraged participation in or resistance to the state and thus ensured women’s place outside of the legal system’s prevailing moral order.