Girls, Women, and Crime

Selected Readings

Meda Chesney-Lind, Lisa J. Pasko

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781452289137
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Criminologia

What characterizes women's and girls' pathways to crime?

Girls, Women, and Crime: Selected Readings, Second Edition is a compilation of journal articles on the female offender written by leading researchers in the fields of criminology and women's studies. The contributors reveal the complex worlds females in the criminal justice system must often negotiate—worlds that are frequently riddled with violence, victimization, discrimination, and economic marginalization. This in-depth collection leaves readers with a greater understanding of the complexities and nuances of the realtionship between girls and women and crime.

PART I

GENDER AND CRIMINOLOGICAL THEORIZING

Gender at the Forefront

Traditionally, criminology has largely been a study of male crime and male victimization. Intellectual theorizing about crime and crime policy has actually been a type of theorizing about male deviance and criminality, with little to no attention paid to the role of gender. Women’s and girls’ experiences with crime, deviance, and victimization were at the periphery of scholarly inquiry, female crime was overlooked almost completely, and female victimization was ignored, trivialized, and minimized. Feminist criminology challenged the overall androcentric nature of traditional criminology by pointing to the repeated exclusion and misrepresentation of women and girls in criminological theory.

Feminist criminology places gender at the center of criminological theorizing. It recognizes how patriarchal power relations and inequality differentially affect men and women both in their criminal activities and in their experiences with victimization. It demonstrates how gender matters, not only in terms of one’s pathways into and out of crime, but also in how the criminal justice system responds to the offenders under its authority. Gender is no longer a mere demographic variable or a brief footnote. Suddenly, men have gender, too, and male behavior is no longer considered the “normal” response to life.

The readings in this section represent criminological theorizing that keeps gender in the forefront. The first two readings underscore the merger of gender studies and gender theory with criminology. Summarizing the major models of feminist inquiry during the 1980s, Kathleen Daly presents an evaluation of the benefits and limitations of such theorizing for criminology. Through these modes of thought, she demonstrates how gender can be conceptualized as more than an attribute, how it is produced by social practices and situations, and how it is entwined with other social relations (namely, race and class). In the second reading, Lyn Mikel Brown, Meda Chesney-Lind, and Nan Stein apply feminist critical thought to understanding female violence, relational aggression, and bullying. The authors examine the consequences of the degendering and decontextualizing female violence and victimization and show the various ways anti-bullying programs in schools reinforce sex role stereotypes and structural inequities.

The last two readings showcase directions for feminism and activism in the field of criminological research and policy. Dana M. Britton discusses feminism’s initial and ongoing impact on criminology and its emerging contributions both inside and outside the field and trends in emerging research. Hillary Potter’s chapter examines one such emerging trend—Black feminist criminology. Using an integrated approach to understanding African American women’s experiences with intimate partner abuse, Potter shows how Black feminist criminology offers a fresh and more comprehensive consideration of African American women’s experiences with and responses to domestic violence.

Chapter 1

DIFFERENT WAYS OF CONCEPTUALIZING SEX/GENDER IN FEMINIST THEORY AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR CRIMINOLOGY

KATHLEEN DALY

At a recent feminist conference held at the Australian National University, I was struck by the varied vocabularies and assumptions used to discuss sex and gender. There is nothing unusual about seeing differences among women and feminists when we speak and write, but the categories of difference I saw took a new form. They were not marked by the familiar distinctions of liberal, radical and socialist-feminist; nor by identity politics in terms of a speaker’s self-declared race-ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, physical ability, and the like. Nor were they ordered—at least not explicitly—by method and epistemology, including feminist arguments ‘for’ or ‘against’ postmodern ways of theorizing. What I observed set in motion a rethinking of the ways that sex and gender are conceptualized in feminist theory and in criminology. They can be termed ‘class-race-gender,’ ‘doing gender’ (and subsequently, ‘doing difference’), and ‘sexed bodies.’ In describing and presenting these modes of feminist enquiry, I do not want to suggest that they cover the field.¹ Rather, I wish to clarify the contributions and limits of each to criminological knowledge.

My essay has two parts. In the first, I sketch major challenges to feminist theory that emerged in the 1980s concerning the production of knowledge and truth claims. This can be termed the ‘knowledge problem’ for feminism. The second describes three modes of feminist enquiry that responded, in part, to the challenges of the 1980s.

CHALLENGES TO FEMINIST THEORY

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Engaging academic feminism in the 1960s and 1970s was how and whether sex, gender and ‘women’ could be linked or ‘added on’ to liberal and Marxist theories. A burgeoning literature developed that compared liberal, radical, Marxist and socialist feminist perspectives (see, for example, Jaggar, 1983; Sargeant, 1981). In ‘Feminism and Criminology,’ Meda Chesney-Lind and I appended an overview of these perspectives on the ‘causes’ of inequality and strategies for social change (Daly and Chesney-Lind, 1988: 536–8). We did so reluctantly: while we wished to show that a range of feminist positions was possible, we worried the typology would become fixed precisely when it was unravelling.² It became apparent by the mid-1980s that the task for feminist theory was no longer how ‘to remove “biases” [from Marxism and liberalism] but to see this “bias” as intrinsic to the structure of the theories in question’ (Gatens, 1996: 60).

Shifting Ground in the 1980s

In the 1980s, feminist theory was especially influenced by scholars in philosophy and literature. This signalled a shift from the sociocultural and historical emphases of the 1970s, when scholars began to ‘uncover’ women’s histories and to reveal ethnographic diversity and commonality in women’s lives. Michele Barrett (1992) characterizes this shift as moving from ‘things’ to ‘words.’ In the 1970s, feminist scholars had referred to women or women’s experiences unproblematically, and they had stressed the importance of distinguishing biological sex from socio-cultural gender, and of developing a comprehensive feminist theory that might replace liberal, Marxist or psychoanalytical theories. But those efforts became untenable in the 1980s. A related critical challenge came from women marginalized by feminist theory and from a variety of postmodern/poststructuralist texts and theorists.³ These developments set in motion questions about how feminist knowledge is and should be produced and evaluated.

Early critiques of racism (hooks, 1981) and heterosexism suggested a failure of previous feminist scholarship to reflect on its own ‘white solipsism’ (Rich, 1979: 299) and ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (Rich, 1980). Just when some feminist scholars sought to develop a women’s standpoint on knowledge, drawing either from Marxist terminology of proletarian consciousness (Hartsock, 1983) or women’s bifurcated consciousness (Smith, 1979, 1987), the grounds for claiming a singular women’s standpoint began to dissolve. Increasing attention was given to differences among women, which spawned what was termed identity politics: naming who one ‘was’ in terms of social location or ‘identity,’ with a particular set of experiences and viewpoints, and hence, different knowledges ‘about women.’ Voices that had been excluded from or ignored within feminist thought—e.g. self-identified radical women of color (Moraga and Anzaldua, 1983) and black feminists (Collins, 1986), among others (Cole, 1986)—gained presence in the 1980s, giving notice to the dominant white, middle-class voices of feminist thought that theirs was not the only feminist analysis in town.⁴

Feminists who drew from postmodern thought also challenged the term woman, though for the reason that it lacked a stable and unified referent.⁵ But, like the early critiques from women marginalized by feminist thought, which raised questions about whose knowledge or ‘experience’ was legitimate, feminists working with postmodern texts raised questions about power in the production of knowledge.

Several major feminist literary theorists—Jane Gallop, Marianne Hirsch and Nancy Miller—discussed the role of feminist critique and their fears of being criticized by other scholars. As Gallop admitted,

I realize that the set of feelings that I used to have about French men I now have about African-American women. Those are the people I feel inadequate in relation to and try to please in my writing. (Gallop et al., 1990: 363–4)

Gallop’s comment suggests that her feminist literary analysis was first affected by French men and then by black women.⁶ I suspect this chronology was common for US feminist literary scholars. Certainly, it was more so for this group than for US feminists in sociology, who responded first to the charge of racism in feminist thought and who were relatively more resistant to postmodern influences. These different histories of coming to terms with ‘French men and black women’ have important consequences for how we think through the problem of ‘difference’ (both among and between men and women) and the degree to which postmodern/poststructuralist theoretical terms are embraced.⁷

For feminists in sociology, the problem of difference is commonly understood to mean mapping variation in women’s (and men’s) lives, of documenting power and resistance in interaction, and of assuming that one’s engagement in social structures (and especially, class, raceethnicity, gender, sexuality and age) matter in shaping one’s consciousness, patterns of speech, behavior and capacity to affect social structures. In sociological empirical terms, difference is hardly novel; it is another way to theorize variability and power in social life. For literary scholars, the problem of difference is more often understood primarily as a discursive construction, its elements being binary oppositions in language, the construction of the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ as constitutive of hierarchical sexual difference, and for some, an interest in the unconscious psyche. This contrast renders these approaches more oppositional than I would like, but two observations can be made.

First, humanities scholars set the feminist theoretical agenda in the 1980s; they were quicker than social science scholars to work with postmodern texts and theorists and, as such, they were more interested in the ways in which language and discourse set limits on what could be known. One result of the dominance of the humanities in the production of feminist knowledge is that scholars may not appreciate—indeed they may misunderstand—the practices of empirical social research. Another is that the work exhibits a form of theoretical imperialism or theoreticism, where the primary activity is discussion of concepts in the abstract.

Second, and more speculatively, I suspect that many humanities scholars read the race critique through postmodern terms, whereas the order may have been reversed for those in sociology (and kindred social sciences), who read the race critique through modern terms and who took on postmodern texts later. There have, of course, been different directions taken by feminist scholars in response to critique from within and from without. My point here is to note a confluence between the ‘problem of difference’ in feminist theory and a problem of power in the production of feminist knowledge. It is illustrated by Maria Lugones (a philosopher and Latina), who describes how ‘white women’ addressed the problem of difference:

White women conceived [not] noticing us as a theoretical problem, which they label the problem of difference…. But white women theorists seem to have worried more passionately about the harm the claim does to theorizing than about the harm the theorizing did to women of color. The ‘problem of difference’ refers to feminist theories—these theories are the center of concern. The attempted solutions to the ‘problem of difference’ try to rescue feminist theorizing from several … pitfalls that would render it false, trivial, weak, and so on. (Lugones, 1991: 41)

As Lugones suggests, the problem of difference was framed by many feminist theorists solely as a problem for theory. Whereas she locates this tendency as stemming from ‘white women’s theorizing,’ I see it stemming from a disciplinary-based theoreticism, especially evident in philosophy, but which may also have a class and racial nexus.⁸ In comparison to philosophy, there was a larger group of feminists in sociology who called for ‘incorporating’ class-race-gender into the curriculum and research (see Andersen and Collins, 1992).⁹ That incorporation is not without problems (see Piatt, 1993), but it remains a major theoretical point of entry, especially for feminists of color, and a strategy for coalitional knowledge-building across groups.

Contrary to the claims of radical feminism of the early 1970s, Moira Gatens (1996: 62) suggests that it would be naive to think that feminists can produce ‘pure or non-patriarchal theory.’ This issue is central to the knowledge problem for feminism: it invites a rethinking of how we adjudicate among competing claims about ‘women’ or ‘women’s experiences.’ Are some better than others, and how do we decide?

Empiricist-Standpoint-Postmodern Feminisms

In the mid-1980s, Sandra Harding made an important contribution when she compared different epistemologies in producing feminist knowledge: empiricist, standpoint and postmodern (Harding, 1986, 1987). She noted the paradox (Harding, 1986: 24) that feminism was a political movement for social change and yet feminist researchers were producing knowledge in the natural and social sciences that was more ‘likely to be confirmed by evidence’ than previous scientific claims. Harding wondered, ‘How can such politicized research be increasing the objectivity of inquiry? On what grounds should these feminist claims be justified?’ She suggested that there were two ‘solutions’ (empiricism and standpointism) and one ‘agenda for a solution’ (postmodernism).

By feminism empiricism, Harding referred to improvements in knowledge by removing sexist and androcentric biases. This meant to ‘correct’ but not to transform the methodological norms of science. Such a stance was dominant in 1970s feminist social science work, including criminology; and it remains strong in the 1990s. An unfortunate legacy in Harding’s analysis is the choice of the term empiricism in light of its connotations in social research.¹⁰ In the social sciences, empiricist or empiricism are distinguished from empirical. The former terms refer to nontheorized empirical enquiry: that which exhibits the ‘imperialism of the technique’ or that which assumes a firm foundation of knowledge through observation (Wagner, 1992). However, one can do empirical work without being empiricist or without assuming an epistemology of empiricism. It seems crucial, then, that the term empirical not be tied to a particular epistemology. It is as large as ‘text,’ and both can stand in a constructive tension in the practice of social research.

By feminist standpoint, Harding (1986: 26) referred to how ‘women’s subjugated position provides the possibility of more complete and l...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Brief Contents
• Detailed Contents
• Introduction
• PART I. GENDER AND CRIMINOLOGICAL THEORIZING: GENDER AT THE FOREFRONT
• PART II. FEMALE JUVENILE DELINQUENTS: VICTIMIZATION, DELINQUENCY, AND THE JUVENILE JUSTICE SYSTEM
• PART III. THE WOMAN OFFENDER: WOMEN'S EXPERIENCES WITH DRUGS, CRIME, AND VIOLENCE
• PART IV. THE FEMALE OFFENDER AND INCARCERATION: BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER INCARCERATION
• Index
• About the Editors