Knowledge Bank

This paper first examines how the senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee treated Justice Sotomayor during her Confirmation Hearing to the Supreme Court of the United States in 2009. I intersect this analysis with the ways that prejudices about the Latina body tie into senators’ treatment of Sotomayor and their assumptions about her impartiality (i.e. regarding immigration) and her temperament. Next, I identify three strategies that Sotomayor used to maneuver within this space to gain the confirmation: 1) deploying specific American values, 2) performing white masculinity, and 3) distancing herself from particularly raced or sexed politics, such as her work with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund. Both the senator's questions and the strategies that Sotomayor used to maneuver within her Confirmation Hearing are revealing of the way historically marginalized people operate to survive within dominant white patriarchal culture.