In “Law is not Turgid and Literature not Soft and Fleshy,” Greta Olson disapproves of the symbolic gendering in Law and Literature scholarship. She challenges the reductive binary of law as rational/masculine and literature as emotional/feminine, calling instead for their degendering. Yet her analysis gives limited attention to the interpretive habits that naturalize these binaries, risking reproduction of the very essentialisms she seeks to dismantle.

Olson critiques the recurrent use of feminized metaphors like “Her” or Ariadne in legal-literary scholarship, where they function as symbolic correctives to law’s masculinist austerity through the projection of emotional, maternal, or redemptive traits. However, while she acknowledges the risk of essentialism, she does not interrogate why such metaphors — or femininity itself — are consistently cast in narrow tropes. By accepting these connotations as given, Olson ends up reinscribing the very logics she seeks to undo. The issue lies not only in the metaphors themselves, but also the cultural frameworks that naturalize such associations. By focusing on the former, she underplays the broader systems that frame femininity — and these figures — through reductive, exclusionary lenses.

A further limitation is Olson’s disproportionate focus on feminine analogies. While she critiques them as essentialist, the masculine traits they oppose receive far less scrutiny, probing less into how masculinization of law became naturalized as the normative, unmarked ground. This imbalance risks reproducing the asymmetry she critiques, casting femininity as problematic while leaving masculinity relatively unexamined.

Granted, a full genealogy of gendering may exceed the scope of Olson’s paper. Still, her analysis would benefit from deeper engagement with how these metaphors are produced, circulated, and internalized. They aren’t inherently essentialist; they gain meaning through dominant interpretive habits shaped by cultural norms. Rather than discard them altogether, we might open them to more ambivalent, plural, or contradictory interpretations that resist fixation. The aim isn’t to reinscribe gender with new values, but to unsettle the binary itself — preserving metaphor’s power while refusing its capture by essentialist codes.

Olson’s essay shines when revealing how symbolic binaries shape Law and Literature, but moving beyond them requires examining the interpretive habits that naturalize such binaries. Otherwise, the call to de-gender risks remaining rhetorical — altering language without dismantling the deep-rooted frameworks that sustain essentialism. A more transformative approach would open symbolic figures to plural, fluid, and intersectional interpretations — not defined by a fixed set of traits, but as sites of ambivalent and continually shifting meaning.

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