Sonia Sotomayor’s slap-down of Clarence Thomas this week did more than express a dissenting opinion, it made the 61-year-old jurist a member of an exclusive club: supreme court justices who have transcended the legal and political arena and entered the realm of pop culture.
Within a day or so of Sotomayor speaking out against her fellow justices’ ruling – that evidence gathered during an illegal search should be considered admissible – she had gone from being an outspoken but sober member of the highest court in the land to being “Sonia from the block”, her portrait popping up all over the internet overlaid with inspirational quotes from her own speech, or defiant lyrics by Beyoncé.
At work here, as in every memification of an establishment figure, was a combination of admiration, affection and playful condescension. It was also rooted in the novelty of there being women on the supreme court at all. Like her colleague Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sotomayor, before she even gets out of the gate, is elevated to the level of near-icon as one of only four women justices and the sole Hispanic woman to have served in that role.
With a little tweaking, she becomes at least structurally the torch-bearer for a marginalized group, less dusty old judge than romantic figurehead, from whence it’s a short haul to liberation icon and the descent – or ascent, depending on one’s view – into all-out kitsch.
It helps, in these circumstances, to have liberal politics. Since her death, Margaret Thatcher has been to some extent kitschified, but conservative views tend to wear less well on a T-shirt than liberal ones. These women, at the very heart of the establishment, nonetheless occupy a role as outsiders, their progressive values all the more admirable in light of their age and the reactionary eras through which they have persisted in holding them.
And they are tough. Behind the humor of young people teasing old people with references they almost certainly won’t get – notably, the Bader Ginsburg-inspired Tumblr Notorious RBG – lies the absolute certainty that the 83-year-old could take any of us down if it came to a fight. Overlaying images of these women with more traditional representations of street toughness is a good joke, yes, but it also speaks to the scale of their rebellion.
When Sotomayor defends the disenfranchised against the police and judicial establishment, the stakes are as high as can possibly be imagined.
The #NotoriousRBG is a beast: The first to release an opinion from every sitting, including one sitting w/2. #SCOTUS pic.twitter.com/qTC0M9jHPC
— Leah Litman (@LeahLitman) June 13, 2016
The quotes themselves, meanwhile, range from inspirational to funny to self-deprecating and human, not an abundantly found register in that neck of the woods. From RBG: “Women belong in all places where decisions are being made.” And “every now and then it helps to be a little deaf”. And, most memorably: “People ask me sometimes, when will there be enough women on the court? And my answer is, when there are nine.”
(Compare this to Antonin Scalia’s greatest hits, which include the observation: “I occasionally watch movies or television shows in which the F-word is used constantly, not by the criminal class but by supposedly elegant, well-educated, well-to-do people. The society I move in doesn’t behave that way.” Hmmm.)
Sotomayor meanwhile occasionally speaks as if dictating text directly for use on inspirational posters: “I do know one thing about me: I don’t measure myself by others’ expectations or let others define my worth.”
She has a way to go, not least in years, before she reaches RBG levels of hero-worship, but the process might one day be said to have started this week.
“That is the dissenter’s hope, that they are writing not for today but tomorrow,” said Bader Ginsburg once, whose own rebellion may well have peaked not only from her defense of women and minorities, but from a healthy lack of deference towards the machinery of power: at the 2015 State of the Union address she fell asleep, then told the press it was because she’d had wine with her dinner.
