In October 2014, in an apartment in Brisbane, Australia just one block from where I live, Mayang Prasetyo was murdered by her husband Marcus Volke. Despite the alarming frequency of such domestic homicides—on average, in Australia, a woman is murdered by an intimate partner every week (Mouzos and Rushforth 2003; Cussen and Bryant 2015)—such violence rarely attracts significant media attention, and almost never makes the front page of the newspaper. This particular case, however, did hit the front page of the local newspaper, The Courier Mail, the next day, not because of any shift in public concern over domestic homicides, but rather because two key aspects of Prasetyo’s life and death were ripe for sensationalising in what is one of Rupert Murdoch’s less prestigious tabloids.
First, the circumstances of her murder were particularly grisly, and rarely seen in Brisbane. When police were called to investigate reports from neighbours about an overpowering smell coming from the apartment, they found that Volke was allegedly cooking parts of Prasetyo’s body, having killed her in a domestic dispute a few days prior. He fled the scene and subsequently killed himself in a dumpster located in the apartment building in which I live. Such circumstances rarely go unreported. Second, Prasetyo was a transgender woman and had been a sex worker. The front page of The Courier Mail thus featured an image of Prasetyo posing in a bathing suit, along with a headline that read ‘Monster Chef and the She Male’. The report, which continued inside under the headline ‘Ladyboy and the butcher’, contained more photos of Prasetyo in bikinis, and focused on the fact that she was a transgender woman and had advertised herself as a ‘top high-class Asian shemale’ (Brennan et al. 2014; Stephens 2014).
This reporting drew considerable community outrage, with the Australian Press Council later finding that the focus on these details was ‘gratuitous’, caused ‘substantial offence’, and was ‘not sufficiently warranted in the public interest’ (APC 2015). While it is certainly not representative of the general reporting of the case, much of the reporting did devote inordinate attention to such details, over and above what we might consider to be a more pressing and concerning point about this case—that it occurred at the intersection of the epidemics of violence against women (particularly at the hands of intimate partners), violence against transgender people generally, and more specifically violence against transgender people of colour. This misplaced focus on Prasetyo’s transgender and sex worker status turned her into an aberrant object whose intimate life and tragic demise could then serve as the targets of fascination and titillation as much, if not more, than they could as prompts for empathy. This focus also made it more difficult for her to be able to access the status of victim, at least in some mainstream media reporting.
Mayang Prasetyo’s death and its aftermath highlight some issues that are central to the criminal justice experiences of many transgender people. It illustrates the limitations of the state in preventing intimate partner violence, violence against transgender people, and violence against people of colour, not to mention violence against sex workers. It brings to light the difficulties that transgender people experience accessing the status of victim. And it shows just how tenuous one’s hold on that status within the media may be. While they play out in different ways and to varying extents, these issues are also encountered by those who consider themselves to be part of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) communities.1 These groups often find their lives defined by their sexuality and gender ‘difference’, and experience injustices at the hands of criminology and criminal justice institutions as a result, including similar difficulties accessing this victim status.
Only three months prior to Mayang Prasetyo’s murder, this time in San Francisco, USA, another set of events highlighted an entirely different relationship between LGBTIQ communities and criminal justice institutions. During the 2014 Pride celebrations, fetish pornography website Kink.com hosted a prison-themed dance party, the ‘Prison of Love’, where they invited revellers to ‘[l]et [their] fantasies run wild in solitary, fall in love in the shower, plan [their] jailbreak with [their] mates, [and] celebrate [their] creative freedom’ (WE Party 2014). This prison theme, however, proved controversial, attracting criticisms from prominent activists and community organisations that it was trivialising the serious issues of over-policing, the expansion of the carceral state, and the violence experienced by ‘trans women and gender nonconforming people of colour’ (Fireworks Bay Area 2014). Others defended the party, suggesting that it was an appropriate venue for the expression and celebration of sexual fantasies involving prison motifs, pointing to the morally ambiguous presence of prison motifs in queer cultural production. This clash of ideas led to a physical confrontation between protesters and revellers on the night of the party, with partygoers being physically attacked, police and security being called in, and some protesters arrested (see Ball 2016, in press).
The events surrounding the ‘Prison of Love’ party can also offer an insight into the relationships between LGBTIQ communities and criminal justice institutions—an insight somewhat different from that illustrated by Mayang Prasetyo’s death. LGBTIQ communities and criminal justice institutions have long had what might be described as a troubled relationship (Dwyer and Tomsen 2016; Mogul et al. 2011). LGBTIQ people have historically been the targets of such institutions and their policing of deviance. Criminology has provided the intellectual technologies on which these forms of regulation and intervention have been based and through which they have been legitimised. Thus, the choice of the party theme itself is complex and open to multiple readings. For example, the sexualisation of criminal justice-related themes and motifs within gay male cultural production has often been explicitly political, operating as a form of resistance to those institutions. In this light, the party might be understood as a continuation of such politics. One could also argue that the party demonstrates some progress in the relationships between LGBTIQ people and police. The embrace of institutions that have been harmful in queer lives could suggest this, as could the presence of the police at this event—who were there not to shut down the party (as they might have in the past) but to protect those who sought to subvert and sexualise their very power. And one could consider that the party and the events surrounding it are a telling illustration of key dynamics that must be considered in any examination of the relationships between LGBTIQ people and criminal justice institutions. After all, they illustrate that progressive political gains also reproduce cleavages within these communities, marking out those subjects (white, socio-economically advantaged, ‘normative’ gay men and lesbians) deserving of the protection of the criminal justice system from those who are not accorded the same protection (socio-economically disadvantaged, transgender or ‘queer’ people of colour), and who remain subjected to the most punitive interventions of the criminal justice system while simultaneously being overlooked by mainstream lesbian and gay political movements.
These two very different events—separated by a few months and occurring in countries with somewhat similar political and social contexts—indicate the complex and contradictory nature of the interactions between LGBTIQ communities, criminal justice, and criminology. In recent years, a body of criminological and criminal justice-related scholarship has developed which has sought to critically interrogate these interactions, and respond to the ongoing marginalisation of LGBTIQ people in (and by) the criminal justice system, as well as their general exclusion from (or misrepresentation by) criminology. Often termed ‘queer criminology’, this body of work has offered an opportunity to ensure that criminal justice institutions become more responsive to the needs of LGBTIQ people, redressing the serious harms that these communities have experienced as a result of being criminalised or positioned as ‘deviant’. It has also provided an avenue for the reform of criminological theorising, whose silence on matters of importance to LGBTIQ people—when it has not been actively studying their ‘deviance’—has been deafening.
This ‘queer criminology’, however, is difficult to pin down. The term only appeared sporadically within criminology and criminal justice studies over the last few decades. It is only in the last few years that researchers have begun explicitly representing their work as (or having a relation to something called) ‘queer criminology’. This queer criminology has mounted its challenge to criminology and criminal justice studies in a range of ways, drawing from within and outside criminology, taking a number of different paths in the process. The last two years have seen the publication of no less than four scholarly volumes that have further established this emerging body of work: Dana Peterson and Vanessa R. Panfil’s voluminous Handbook of LGBT Communities, Crime, and Justice; a special issue of Critical Criminology on ‘Queer/ing Criminology: New Directions and Frameworks’, edited by Carrie L. Buist, Jordan Blair Woods, and myself; Queering Criminology, edited by Angela Dwyer, Thomas Crofts, and myself; and Carrie L. Buist and Emily Lenning’s Queer Criminology. These have been supported by a host of other texts detailing the experiences of LGBTIQ people, crime, and the criminal justice system (see, for example, Mogul et al. 2011; Stanley and Smith 2011; Johnson and Dalton 2012; Meyer 2015; Laing et al. 2015; Colvin 2012). The momentum provided by these publications has also seen queer criminological scholarship develop a clearer presence at major international conferences and international symposia, and contributed to it being taken more seriously within (at least critical) criminology.
This book is one part of this broader movement. It makes a theoretical and critical contribution to this field. Taking my cue from the notion of ‘queer’ referenced in the term ‘queer criminology’, I specifically interrogate the intersections between criminology and queer theory and scholarship that currently exist, and I suggest ways in which these intersections could be developed in order to articulate both a critique of this developing field, and a possible direction for future queer criminological scholarship.
The Need for a Queer Criminology
A number of key issues motivate the development of a queer criminology, which will no doubt be familiar to those with at least a passing interest in critical criminology and the experiences of LGBTIQ people more generally. I will not restate these reasons in great detail here (they are canvassed exhaustively in the texts already mentioned, and will also be discussed further in Chapter 3), except to say that queer criminology is often positioned as a way of addressing the exclusion or misrepresentation of LGBTIQ people—as victims, offenders, and criminal justice agents—from criminology, and responding to the injustices produced by criminal justice institutions and practices that have not been designed with LGBTIQ people in mind, have failed to protect LGBTIQ people from victimisation and injustice, or have, in fact, formed a key component in the regulation, marginalisation, and criminalisation of LGBTIQ lives (see Mogul e...