‘Pretty funny bloody barrister’: Gendered violence in Shame (1987)

Abstract

Steve Jodrell’s Shame (1987) remains remarkably accurate in its depiction of gendered violence in rural/regional/remote (RRR) Australia. However, viewing the film as a normative statement reveals a complex relationship where the RRR becomes a constructed space giving credence to urban anxieties. Viewed through critical legal theory and a Foucauldian lens, the film depicts the RRR as a psychiatric space where the rule of law is deployed against a rule of unlaw, and legal technicians constitute and reconstitute the law from knowledge into legal discourse ready for reabsorption outside the RRR space. This approach renders the law as inert and constituted and overlooks the law’s own contribution to injustice, especially in issues of gendered violence, as highlighted in recent law reform and social justice developments. While the film’s allegorising of the RRR is disrupted in its ending, its final lines reveal an unshaken belief in law—another universalising technology