Queering Criminology

Matthew Ball, Thomas Crofts, Angela Dwyer, Matthew Ball, Thomas Crofts, Angela Dwyer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137513335
• eBook ISBN: 9781137513342
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Queer criminological work is at the forefront of critical academic criminology, responding to the exclusion of queer communities from criminology, and the injustices that they experience through the criminal justice system. This volume draws together both theoretical and empirical contributions that develop the growing scholarship being produced at the intersection of 'queer' and 'criminology'.
Reflecting the diversity of research that is undertaken at this intersection, the contributions to this volume offer a deeper theoretical and conceptual development of this field alongside empirical research that illustrates the continued relevance and urgency of such scholarship. The contributions consider what it means to be queering criminology in the current political, social, and criminological climate, and chart directions along which this field might develop in order to ensure that greater social and criminal justice for LGBTIQ communities is achieved.

1

Queering Criminologies

Angela Dwyer, Matthew Ball, and Thomas Crofts

Since the 1990s, there has been a move towards an academic articulation of the nexus between queer and criminology. This move is significant because previously criminology and queer theories/methodologies have been somewhat awkward and perhaps dangerous bedfellows (Ball forthcoming). This is not to say that criminological research has not engaged with issues around sexuality, gender, and sex diversity. On the contrary, people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ),¹ and with many other fluid categories of sexuality, gender, and sex diversity, have been the subject of many research studies, but in the past these studies have been informed by a ‘deficit’ or ‘deviancy’ model (Groombridge 1999: 540; Woods 2014). Early criminological work was steeped in the notion that people who displayed characteristics of homosexuality, for instance, were considered a ‘defective sexual species’ (Tomsen 1997: 33) and were studied by criminologists and other social scientists in terms of how they might be cured and controlled. Legislative structures and other governmental mechanisms developed along with these ideas and resultantly criminalised behaviours that queered heterosexuality, and, in particular, sexual contact between men (LeVay 1996; Rydstrom & Mustola 2007; Gunther 2009; Nussbaum 2010). Appearance and clothing that queered gender roles was also regulated by legislation in various times and places in an attempt to shore up normative gender roles – in the United States, for instance, people were required to always be wearing three items of clothing that reflected their ‘natural sex’ in order to avoid prosecution (Faderman 1991). Police were the central mechanism through which these legislative controls were administered, leading to discriminatory and sometimes violent interactions between police and LGBTIQ people (Dwyer 2014). Such discriminatory treatment and harassment by police, including, for example, frequent police raids on gay bars, infamously sparked the Stonewall riot in New York in June 1969, which arguably marked the beginning of the modern fight for LGBTIQ rights (Adam 1987; Engel 2001).

While the focus of criminology has thankfully shifted since the late 1990s, mainstream criminologies could be still characterised as heteronormative. Issues related to sexuality, gender, and sex diversity can be marginalised in research projects, whether intentionally or not. For instance, while people who identify as LGBTIQ are often included in large criminological research projects, many of those projects often remain focused on broader and more traditional criminological concerns (factors influencing offending, victimisation, and one’s criminal justice experience), resulting in the unique issues related to a person’s LGBTIQ status being glossed over or ignored. Further, the general heteronormativity of criminology – which might not look for sexuality, gender, and sex diversity – coupled with perhaps the reluctance of LGBTIQ people to draw attention to their sexuality, gender, or sex diversity in such studies, can leave criminologists in a difficult position when seeking to understand the experiences of some LGBTIQ people. Sexuality may be reduced to a binary of homosexual/heterosexual and gender to male/female, meaning that the experiences of those who identify outside of these binaries remain unknown, or understood only partially and through inappropriate terminologies, categories, and constructs. Again, the result is marginalisation.

Researchers who straddle the divide of criminology and queer can also be oddly situated in broader academic, disciplinary processes. For instance, researchers in this area have often found themselves scattered randomly across different, and at times strangely matched, panel sessions at major international criminology conferences (Petersen & Panfil 2014). They can also face marginalisation and trivialisation of their work (whether they identify as LGBTIQ or not) (LaSala et al. 2008). Even so, this does not mean criminological research is not queer – as Tomsen (1997: 35–36) notes, ‘the simultaneous moral repulsion and sexual fascination with its subject matter, and the homoerotic qualities of so much crime research … are the reasons why criminology must be described as a very queer discipline.’ Importantly though, as Derek Dalton demonstrates in his chapter in this volume, there can be considerable discomfort around where queer fits in criminologies.

So what does it mean to queer the discipline of criminology, or indeed to produce queer criminological research? These are not new questions, though they are being asked more frequently as LGBTIQ people are increasingly gaining social and political visibility and enfranchisement across the Western world, and as those changes slowly influence criminology. They are also questions that underpin this collection. Broadly, criminology might be defined as ranging ‘from the “common-sense”, moralistic, conservative through the legal/classical to sub-cultural and even oppositional readings [of crime and justice]’ (Groombridge 1999: 532–533). We draw this view of criminology together with understandings of queer, not just as a noun taken up by many in a contemporary context to describe their sexuality and/or gender identity, but as a verb, to describe a particular action, set of actions, or ethos – particularly actions that might ‘defy the strictures of the dominant sex/gender/sexual identity system’ (Ault 1996: 322). Queering criminology, then, is about disrupting, challenging, and asking uncomfortable questions that produce new ways of thinking in relation to the lives of LGBTIQ people and criminal justice processes.

In so doing, we get something quite complex, amorphous, and even contradictory. As Ball, Buist, and Woods (2014: 2) suggest, doing what they refer to as ‘queer criminology’ means working through and within ‘a diverse array of criminology-related researches, critiques, methodologies, perspectives, and reflections’ (Ball, Buist, & Woods 2014: 2). Given the (at present) relatively limited range of queer work in criminology, and the significance of the injustices faced by many LGBTIQ people at the hands of the justice system, this diversity of approaches is important in order simply to build our knowledge of these experiences. The disruption that such work requires further necessitates working, in some form or another, at the margins of criminology and being driven and ‘united by a critical attitude of some kind’ (Ball 2014: 21). As such, this collection holds together in tension these sometimes incompatible concepts and approaches, and showcases research from a range of fields outside of but closely related to criminology, as well as different approaches within criminology (such as theoretical, empirical, deconstructive, and positivist approaches) that span the intersections between queer scholarship/communities and criminologies.

Research and theorising around the queer-criminology nexus is growing rapidly. While there are relatively a few researchers engaged in this scholarship worldwide, queer criminological work is at the forefront of critical academic criminology, encompassing a variety of academic projects ranging from the theoretical to the practical. In the last two years, we have seen the emergence of an international Handbook of LGBT Communities, Crime, and Justice dedicated to queer criminology work (Peterson & Panfil 2014), in addition to a special issue on Queer/ing Criminology in a major international criminological journal, Critical Criminology (Ball, Buist, & Woods 2014). Specific projects dedicated to violence against, and the policing of, LGBTIQ people (Berman & Robinson 2010), and their experiences inside criminal justice systems (Mogul et al. 2011; Stanley & Smith 2011; Duggan 2012), and as agents of those systems (Colvin 2012), continue to grow. All these projects seek to directly address the heteronormativity of mainstream criminology by responding to the needs of LGBTIQ communities, and providing a space within which queer perspectives can be drawn into criminology. They hold criminology to account for its failures in this regard, and offer new ways of thinking and speaking about LGBTIQ experiences within criminological frameworks, bending and stretching these frameworks in order to make queer criminologies thinkable, possible, and productive of better futures.

Inspired by the earlier work of Mason and Tomsen (1997) and their conference on violence against gay and lesbian people, we sought to bring together scholars from around Australia in a symposium hosted at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) to consider the current state and future directions of research at the intersection of queer and criminology. Australian scholars have long been at the forefront of efforts to queer criminology and we hoped to ensure that Australian scholarship remained central to the growing development of this field. The result is this collection of research focusing on some of the central (theoretical, practical, methodological, and political) concerns of queer criminological scholars and scholarship – a collection which considers the implications of these issues beyond the Australian context from which a number of them emerged.

Overview of the volume

This volume opens with a number of largely theoretical and conceptual contributions to the development of the amorphous field of queer criminological scholarship. The chapters in this first part, ‘Queer Criminology: Past, Present, and Future’, all suggest directions for this field, reflecting on the relationship between queer criminology and mainstream criminology, the assumptions about progress that are often made within such work, and the kinds of critical scholarship that queer criminological work might entail.

In the opening chapter, Derek Dalton offers a personal reflection on the current state of this field and its possible future, taking stock of where we are and where we might go. Exhibiting what might be described as a cautious ambivalence towards both criminology and queer theory, Dalton suggests that while sitting on the criminological margins is productive for queer work, if it is to have any significant impact and not simply be dismissed, it is essential for queer criminology to engage with the ‘mainstream’. Working through this tension of simultaneously wanting to be an outsider and an insider, he suggests that it is up to queer criminologists to ‘charm’ rather than ‘smash’ our way into criminology, offering criminology our own ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’-style ‘make-better’. Perhaps, as he alludes, we may never be fully part of ‘the mainstream’, but it is important that queer criminologists work out exactly what kind of relationship we have to ‘mainstream’ criminology.

Some queer criminological scholarship, as well as reforms in the criminal justice system that seek to address injustices experienced by LGBTIQ people, are often underpinned by the assumption that expanding queer perspectives in criminology, and responding to the unique experiences of LGBTIQ people in criminal justice reforms, are progressive moves. They hold that, however incrementally, these developments edge us ever closer to the achievement of greater criminal and social justice for LGBTIQ people. Angela Dwyer and Stephen Tomsen’s chapter challenges this assumption by considering a unique problem that arises when we try to, for example, improve relationships between LGBTIQ communities and police. Given that such reforms occur against the backdrop of histories of police violence towards these communities, Dwyer and Tomsen suggest that traces of these histories always remain and have the potential to re-emerge, destroying much of the work that goes into improving those relationships. They illustrate these dynamics by discussing the violent arrest of a community member at the 2013 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and the community response to this, ultimately suggesting that, given the discursive circulation of these histories, interactions between the community and the police are effectively ungovernable. Such a perspective is instructive for queer criminologists, as it requires us to rethink the investments that we make in what we characterise as progressive criminal justice reforms.

The final chapter in this opening part expands these problematisations of queer investments in criminal justice institutions and explores which styles of critical scholarship may be most productive for queer criminology. By considering the ‘Prison of Love’ party, held during the San Francisco Pride celebrations of 2014, as well as the protests claiming that the party inappropriately celebrated unjust institutions that victimise LGBTIQ people, Matthew Ball utilises the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to identify the ‘paranoid’ and ‘reparative’ reading practices that appeared throughout these debates. Paranoid readings, he suggests, underpin many of the arguments that the criminal justice system is inherently injurious, and hold that the exposure of this injustice will lead to a fundamental dismantling of such institutions. Reparative readings, on the other hand, underpin the position of those who maintain that there is some value in connecting to injurious objects such as the justice system, and that a repair of those injuries is possible. Ball suggests that while both approaches have limitations, there is a lot to be gained from resisting the pull of paranoid readings in queer criminological scholarship, and fostering greater opportunities for reparative readings. This may in fact be in line with many of the broader goals of queer criminological scholarship, and a useful approach to follow in such scholarship in the future.

The contributions that make up Part II, ‘Uncomfortable Subjects in Queer Criminology’, examine precisely those issues and individuals which, to this point, have been largely overlooked in the development of this field. These oversights may be for a number of reasons, whether due to the fact that research has not yet turned in the direction of these subjects, or because they are in themselves uncomfortable subjects to discuss. In many respects, the chapters in this section expand on those in the first, directly pushing the boundaries of queer criminological scholarship, and forcing queer criminologists to confront exactly who or what might constitute the proper objects of their work.

This part opens with Senthorun Raj’s chapter examining disgust. Analysing a range of criminal law cases from across the UK, the USA, and Australia that deal in some way with queer sex, Raj points to the different methods through which disgust and queerness are connected in these cases. Through this analysis he suggests that disgust has been used both to criminalise and to decriminalise queer sex acts. That is, its mobilisation has produced at times a way of sanitising queer intimacy, and at others, a way of recoiling from unconventional intimacy. Thus, while embracing disgust might seem to be a useful and legitimate queer strategy, such a mobilisation of disgust in queer criminological politics is potentially dangerous, given that it may produce (as it has before) new ways of regulating queer sex.

In some respects, Dave McDonald’s chapter extends on Raj’s discussions of disgust, confronting one of the most uncomfortable (and disgust-provoking) subjects in queer criminology: the category of the ‘paedophile’. In his provocative contribution, McDonald asks us to unpack the construction of this category and consider the place of the ‘paedophile’ as an object and subject of queer criminological investigation. Given the interest of queer scholars in non-normativity, the construction of gender and sexuality, and in disrupting conventional thought, it is almost inevitable that queer criminological attention ought to be drawn in this direction. However, there is considerable controversy around opening up the term ‘queer’ and expanding its applicability in this way. Explorations of these issues sit uncomfortably beside queer criminological work that seeks to achieve inclusion for LGBTIQ people, or work that seeks to ensure the respectability of queer scholarship within the criminological mainstream. By forcing us to confront some of these questions, McDonald’s chapter not only pushes some of the boundaries of queer criminological scholarship, but also operates to ensure that such work remains unsettling.

Wendy O’Brien’s chapter shifts the focus substantially in order to consider a topic central to queer criminological scholarship that has received less attention than many others: the legal regulatory frameworks through which sexuality and gender are policed in Australia. These have been under-explored, particularly in the context of intersex people, and O’Brien addresses this oversight. In this chapter, O’Brien identifies the ways in which lives outside of gender binaries are made liveable or unliveable. Through discussing landmark Australian legal cases such as Toonen and Norrie, O’Brien discusses the legal and criminal regulations that provide the background of (non)liveability against which some queer lives are lived and through which legal justice is produced. In so doing, O’Brien also draws out their broader relevance by pointing to the human rights and international law principles that thread through these cases, and the ways in which, though problems still remain in the implications of these laws and decisions, Australia is in many respects leading the way in this legal realm.

Part III, ‘Queer Experiences of Crime and Justice’, moves away in many respects from the theoretical and conceptual, and largely adds to the growing bodies of queer criminological and legal research in other ways, with the general hope of instituting some kind of social and/or legal change. This part includes chapters on hate crimes, personal safety from violence, the potential criminalisation of queer protest, sexual coercion, and intimate partner violence, painting a multifaceted picture of cri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Queering Criminologies
• Part I: Queer Criminology: Past, Present, and Future
• Part II: Uncomfortable Subjects in Queer Criminology
• Part III: Queer Experiences of Crime and Justice
• Index