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Feminist Criminology and the Visual

October 2016

DOI:10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.013.56

Authors:

Kathryn Henne

Australian National University

Rita Shah

Eastern Michigan University

In response to the limitations of mainstream criminology, feminist and visual criminology offer alternative approaches to the study of crime, deviance, justice institutions, and the people implicated by them. Although feminist and visual lines of criminological inquiry have distinct foci and analytical strengths, they both illuminate disciplinary blind spots.

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Feminist Criminology and the Visual

Kathryn Henne and Rita Shah

Summary and Keywords

In response to the limitations of mainstream criminology, feminist and visual criminology

offer alternative approaches to the study of crime, deviance, justice institutions, and the

people implicated by them. Although feminist and visual lines of criminological inquiry

have distinct foci and analytical strengths, they both illuminate disciplinary blind spots.

Feminist criminology responds to criminology’s embedded gender biases, while visual

criminology challenges criminology’s reliance on text and numbers. They offer

approaches to redress criminology’s general lack of attention to the broader cultural

dynamics that inform crime, both as a category and as a practice. Unpacking the visual

through a feminist criminological lens is an emergent critical project, one that brings

together and extends existing feminist and visual criminological practices. Combining

feminist criminology and visual studies offers new possibilities in the areas of theory and

methodology. Doing so also lends to new modes through which to query gendered power

relationships embedded in the images of crime, deviance, and culture. Moreover, such an

approach provides alternative lenses for illuminating the constitutive relationships

between visuality, crime, and society, many of which exceed mainstream criminological

framings. It brings together interdisciplinary perspectives from feminist studies and

visual studies rarely engaged by mainstream criminology. Thus, a feminist visual

criminology, as an extension of feminist criminology’s deconstructivist aims, has the

potential to pose significant—arguably foundational—critiques of mainstream

criminology.

Keywords: feminism, gender, visual, theory, methodology and methods, media, new media, digital, androcentric

bias, intersectionality

Feminist criminology responds to mainstream criminology’s biases. In particular, it

reveals and critiques criminology’s male-centric (or “androcentric”) predisposition—that

is, its privileging of men’s experiences and perspectives in relation to empirical and

theoretical knowledge produced about crime and deviance (Cain, 1990; Flavin, 2001; Simon,

1981). Criminology has historically overlooked women’s experiences and perspectives,

both as victims and as perpetrators of crime. Accordingly, criminological theory is often

Subject: Crime, Media, and Popular Culture Online Publication Date: Sep 2016

DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.013.56

Criminology: Oxford Research Encyclopedias

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inadequate for women, even at times overtly misogynistic (Simpson, 1989). In response,

feminist criminology aims to refocus the field from its androcentric standpoint by

highlighting how the study of crime, crime control, and social control are gendered in

ways often disregarded by mainstream criminology (Daly & Chesney-Lind, 1988).

In a similar, albeit different vein, visual criminology is a response to the textual

dominance within criminology. Specifically, it incorporates the study of images to

understand crime, crime control, and social control. However, visual criminology, like

visual studies more generally, is not simply the analysis of images. As pioneering visual

theorist W. J. T. Mitchell (2002, p. 178) explains, “the study of the visual image is just one

component of the larger field … Visual culture is the visual construction of the social, not

just the social construction of vision.” In short, studies of the visual also interrogate how

vision informs—and is informed by—social conditions. These relationships, both overt and

discursive, are pervasive and manifest historically and culturally in the contemporary

moment.

Drawing attention to the importance of the visual points to the limitations of text-based

documents and statistics. Alone, they provide an incomplete picture of crime and

deviance. In response, visual criminology often takes two forms: (1) it utilizes visual

methods to analyze an array of issues within criminology and (2) it analyzes the visual

culture of crime, crime control, and social control using a variety of methods. Both lines

of visual criminological inquiry do at times converge. Moreover, visual criminology, like

feminist criminology, brings attention to overlooked dimensions of crime and power

relationships underpinning mainstream criminology. Although there is a rich literature on

how media shapes public understandings of crime and offending (e.g., Barak, 1994; Burns

& Crawford, 1999; Cohen, 1972; Cohen & Young, 1981; Dowler, Fleming, & Muzzatti, 2006;

Killingbeck, 2001; Sacco, 1995), visual and feminist criminology offer distinctly different

contributions. Their shared commitment to critiquing and rethinking criminological

knowledge, including certain dominant understandings of crime and media, provides

concepts and tools for studying the diversity of contemporary social problems linked to

the visual, crime, and deviance.

Analyzing the visual through a feminist criminological lens is an emergent critical project.

Although feminist criminology and visual criminology often emerge as distinct projects,

there are notable examples that showcase their combined potential (e.g., Daniel, 2007;

Fleetwood, 2015; Rafter & Brown, 2011; Young, 1996). Combining feminist criminology and

visual studies offers new possibilities in the areas of theory and methodology as well as

new modes of querying the gendered power relationships embedded in images of crime,

deviance, and culture. They also serve as alternative lenses for illuminating the

constitutive relationships between visuality, crime, and society, many of which exceed

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mainstream criminological framings. A small but growing body of existing work

underscores points of methodological and theoretical points of convergence between

feminist criminology and visual studies. In particular, as Eamonn Carrabine (2012, p. 463)

suggests, the “remarkable visual turn in criminology” and its concern for “distinctive

ethical questions posed by visual representations of harm, suffering, and violence” can

prompt potentially productive synergies with feminist criminology.

Feminist and Visual Criminological Literature

In responding to the blind spots of conventional criminology, both feminist and visual

criminological approaches offer alternative approaches to the study of crime, deviance,

justice institutions, and the people implicated by them. They do, however, maintain

distinct foci and analytical strengths. Whereas feminist criminology aims to correct

embedded biases of male-centered criminology, a “visually attuned criminology” sheds

light on “problems of theory, methods, ethical engagement, political reform, and social

responsibilities that come with the production, representation, and analysis of

images” (Brown, 2014, p. 181). Visual culture is a fruitful site to explore feminist

criminological concerns, particularly as scholars have already connected it to trauma and

state violence (Mirzoeff, 2006, 2011).

Feminist Criminological Approaches

The breadth of feminist criminological approaches is too long and rich to capture in an

article. For decades, feminists studying crime have documented how conventional

criminology has either disregarded or narrowly conceived women’s experiences in ways

that reflect societal stereotypes (Chesney-Lind & Sheldon, 2004; Gelsthorpe & Morris, 1990;

Simon, 1981). This observation can be traced to the origins of criminology when Cesare

Lombroso characterized women as the “weaker sex” who are not as advanced as their

male counterparts, as evidenced, for example, by their biologically hindered sexual

desires (Rafter, 2008). Lombroso’s explanation that women are inherently weaker than

men, however, is an outgrowth of patriarchal ideologies and gendered expectations of

women typical of the Victorian era.

While mainstream criminology no longer promotes early biological theories of crime,

feminist scholars contend that embedded male-centric values remain, despite

criminology’s scientific claims of objectivity (Naffine, 1996). Although individual critiques

vary, feminist criminologists bring attention to an overarching concern: that men, their

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experiences, as well as their perspectives of broader social relations continue to pervade

criminological theory and research. This results in criminology’s “generalizability

problem” (Daly & Chesney-Lind, 1988; Simpson, 1989): that is, how can criminology claim to

purport general theories of crime if it fails to adequately account for women who make up

half of the general population?

By providing evidence that contradicts criminology’s claims of being value neutral,

feminist criminology poses important epistemological questions (Britton, 2000; Naffine,

1996). Epistemology, as distinct from methodology and methods, encompasses theories

about what can and should constitute knowledge, the philosophical underpinnings of

knowledge production and how to pursue knowledge (Harding, 1991). To advance

criminological knowledge, feminist criminologists have documented the field’s

androcentric biases, arguing that a “focus on gender goes beyond simply adding another

variable to the empirical study of law and legal institutions” (Chesney-Lind & Sheldon,

2004, p. 128). Instead, feminist criminology comprehensively examines relationships

between gender, crime, and deviance to correct for male-centered criminology (Cain,

1990).

In pursuing this gendered agenda, feminist criminological inquiry has expanded to

include broader concerns, including questions about masculinity and offending

(Messerschmidt, 1993) as well as intersectionality, which unearths and interrogates

conventionally overlooked interconnections between different forms of social difference

and inequality, such as race, class, gender, and sexuality (Potter, 2015; Richie, 2012).

Intersectional studies of criminology provide evidence of how women’s experiences in

relation to crime and deviance are far from monolithic. They address not only how

distinct identities are outgrowths of “multiple social relations,” (Daly, 1997, p. 35) but also

how criminal justice practices disproportionately affect multiply marginalized women and

girls from impoverished communities (Chesney-Lind & Sheldon, 2004; Miller, 2008; Richie,

2012).

Feminist criminology increasingly accounts for the transnational dimension of crime and

deviance, acknowledging that contemporary globalization retains postcolonial contours

(Bosworth & Flavin, 2007; Cunneen, 2011). Accordingly, feminist criminologists have started

adapting and revising existing feminist frameworks so as to better capture and analyze

how these legacies inform the multiple inequalities that shape gendered formations of

violence (Henne & Troshynski, 2013). Kate Henne and Emily Troshynski (2013) scrutinize

how criminology, including its feminist traditions, retains dimensions of criminology’s

imperialist roots, calling for the integration of interdisciplinary feminist transnational

paradigms that focus on interlocking systems of power more broadly. In essence, this is a

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call to extend intersectional concerns about power, representation, violence, and

inequality beyond the identities of those affected by crime.

Feminist criminology reveals two additional dimensions of conventional criminology’s

standpoint: it is Occidentalist in that it disavows important forms of difference, and it is

Orientalist in that it reduces marginalized groups to essentialist depictions of exotic

Others (Cain, 2000). Through its endeavors to correct for these tendencies, feminist

criminology has a strong tradition of reflexivity—that is, the practice of identifying and

accounting for scholars’ assumptions and their influence on research practice and

findings (Flavin, 2001). Feminist criminology, as Jeanne Flavin (2001, p. 273) suggests,

demonstrates the value of making the critical consideration of “a multiplicity of factors”

and “richer contextual analysis” the norm for criminological research “rather than the

exception.” In terms of praxis, it retains a longstanding commitment to understanding

how gendered discourses operate in relation to—as well as the lived experiences of—

crime, violence, and victimization.

The reflexive tradition within feminist intellectual thought has the capacity to inform

scholarly approaches to and understandings of “epistemology, theory, methodology, and

policy” (Flavin, 2001, p. 271). It contributes to all areas of criminological knowledge

production, and it is not limited to a particular methodological orientation. Feminist

criminology employs an array of methodologies and methods, including qualitative,

quantitative, and mixed-methods approaches. To grasp how feminist criminology engages

the visual and how that engagement might inform conventional criminology first requires

a better sense of visual criminological approaches.

Visual Criminological Approaches

As Keith Hayward (2010) notes, the embrace of the visual is a natural extension of the

cultural turn in criminology. Accordingly, many visual criminological approaches build

from and extend cultural criminological framings (Hayward, 2010, p. 3), which situate

“crime, criminality, and control squarely in the context of cultural dynamics.”

Specifically, cultural criminologists view crime and crime control agencies as socially

constructed through the creation of “collective meaning and collective identity,”

becoming steeped in symbolism and power (Ferrell, Hayward, & Young, 2008, pp. 1–2).

This trajectory reflects visual studies’ longstanding commitment to the political critique

of images, a tradition shaped primarily by two core strands of intellectual thought: the

foundational work of Mitchell (1986) and U.K.-based cultural theorists, such as Stuart Hall

and Raymond Williams.

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The visual is not simply a representation of the real; rather, it is a mode of engaging

representation, which is an integral aspect of contemporary social worlds. The image and

the real are interconnected, arguably inseparable (Ferrell & Van de Voorde, 2010). Crime

is no exception, particularly as images of crime and crime control proliferate and are

tacitly understood as the realities of crime (Young, 1996). While the literature on crime and

media acknowledges this relationship, a goal of visual criminology is to question the ways

in which this relationship is created. For instance, Hayward (2010, p. 5) argues that the

studying of images enables the interrogation of how crime is framed and understood, how

power is conveyed, and how images “can be used as both a tool of control and

resistance.” In essence, the visual captures important processes, ideological

contestations, and political maneuvers that go overlooked if criminologists fail to

interrogate representations and their power.

Following suit, visual criminologists seek to better understand the nature and impact of

how crime and punishment are represented visually, with a focus on how the political and

cultural economies underpinning the visual can reflect and contribute to norms and

perceptions of crime and deviance. The visual thus serves as a lens through which to

observe constitutive relationships between law and social control. As highlighted in the

May 2014 special issue of Theoretical Criminology, studies on visual culture and

iconography within criminology range from carceral studies (Brown, 2014; Schept, 2014) to

banned images in public spaces (Young, 2014) and media representations of crime,

punishment, and violence (Wakeman, 2014). Collectively, the articles in the special issue

call for new theories and methods that account for the visual and its political dimensions;

the issue also highlights interdisciplinary links between criminology and other fields of

inquiry to develop more nuanced understandings of the visual (Rafter, 2014).

How and what different actors can see depends very much on their social position. Tyler

Wall and Travis Linnemann’s (2014) analysis of debates over body-worn police cameras

serves as a clear example: the public’s desire for transparency through images of officer-

involved violence is in direct tension with officers’ desire to maintain a protected position

beyond the camera’s gaze. Their analysis opens avenues for observing and theorizing

tensions between officers, photographers, filmmakers, and the public regarding control

over recordings of violence and the limits of the image (Jackson, 2015). As John Jackson

(2015, p. 6) makes clear, “there is far too much that the camera (like ‘the naked eye’)

doesn’t or can’t capture—that lies just beyond its rectangular frame or what transpired

before the camera was turned on.” Unseen moments, what visual theorist Nicholas

Mirzoeff (2006) refers to as the invisible or hidden, are essential for understanding power

relations informing visual culture.

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A number of criminological works concerned with representations and cultures of crime

demonstrate how visual methods can be used to get at deeper theoretical understandings

of relationships between crime, social conditions, and punishment (e.g., Kane, 2009;

Morrison, 2010). Criminologists tend to draw from visual methods developed in the

humanities and other social sciences (e.g., Rose, 2012) to study the criminal justice system

(e.g., Lynch, 2000, 2002, 2004) and the various ways images reflect and inform societal

understandings of crime and punishment (e.g., Dowler, 2002; Rapping, 2003).

Particular methods include semiology, researcher-created images, and critical analyses of

existing images and visuals. Rita Shah (2015) uses photo documentation and semiology to

analyze how the look, feel, and location of a parole office impact relationships between

parolee and parole agent. Stephanie Kane’s (2009) ethnographic work elucidates how

stencil graffiti in public waterscapes articulate artistic dissent and how the semiotics of

such graffiti disrupts representations of state power. Other scholars look at

criminological cases in which existing images are central. For example, studies of the

mug shot industry consider how mug shot websites are themselves spectacles (Lageson,

2014): they make public—and open to ridicule and stigma—those who are arrested on a

daily basis without concern for guilt, innocence, or privacy. As such, these analyses bring

attention to the affective and political nature of the images as well as the long-term effect

of these images being public. Cécile Van de Voorde (2012) uses photo-elicitation—that is,

using photographs as a tool for eliciting narratives from respondents—within larger

ethnographic projects studying the intersection of crime, protest, and immigration. In so

doing, Van de Voorde (2012) outlines a set of methods for analyzing the broader carceral

logics that Brown (2014) describes as increasingly visible in settings beyond criminal

justice institutions.

There are growing numbers of visual essays that present and analyze research findings

(Hoffman, 2015). They draw on the power of images and other signifiers “to generate a

scientifically informed whole” rather than rely solely on textual contextualization

(Pauwels, 2012, para. 3.5). Visual essays in criminology have addressed, among other

topics, social disorganization and rural communities (Tunnell, 2006), the problem of

dumping and littering (Tunnell, 2004), and graffiti (Alvelos, 2004; Kane, 2009). Others explore

how images enable incarcerated people to maintain rare and valued forms of intimacy,

attachment, and familial connection (Fleetwood, 2015).

Visual criminology is becoming an important theoretical and methodological approach in

its own right. The forthcoming Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology is

a testament to the subfield’s growth: edited by Michelle Brown and Eamonn Carrabine

(2017), it is the first handbook to interrogate visual criminology, its application, and its

unrealized possibilities. Moreover, it represents a collection of alternative methods for

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generating criminological knowledge, all of which surpass criminology’s traditionally

positivistic orientation.

Although feminist and visual criminology tend to question different aspects of

mainstream criminology, both illuminate disciplinary blind spots. Accordingly, feminist

and visual criminology enable the exploration of power dynamics shaping crime and

criminological knowledge, and their intersections present potentially new synergies for

investigation.

Established Areas of Visual Feminist

Criminological Analysis

A feminist visual criminology, as an extension of feminist criminology, can pose

significant—arguably foundational—critiques of mainstream criminology. These

challenges, although each is distinctly different, share the following common elements:

they bring attention to overlooked tensions around the framing of crime, how mainstream

criminology narrows the methods by which to understand crime, and how mainstream

criminology privileges some views of crime over others. Gender is a core consideration;

however, it is not the only one. Many analyses center on the structures by which crime is

created, such as the media, changes in technology, existing inequalities, and the

academic discipline of criminology itself.

For example, in Imagining Crime, Young (1996) explores the discipline’s “enigmatic

relationship” with crime. Crime, she argues, is not so much tangible as it is understood

through discourse, shaped through “the written and the pictorial: the linguistic turns and

tricks, the framing and editing devices in and through which crime becomes a topic,

obtains and retains its place in discourse” (Young, 1996, p. 16). Despite criminologists’

attempts to categorize and analyze crime, they can never really know it, because crime is

not so much tangible as it is “imagined.” The visual is at the heart of this definition of

crime: it is “mediated as text; the text can therefore be read as crime. The text provides

the scene of the crime. Crime’s images are thus the seen of the crime” (Young, 1996, p.

16). And, these images are essential to public imaginings of crime. Criminology, despite

its intellectual purchase on explaining crime, can thus only engage crime through these

representative forms. As a result, the discipline is premised upon a myth that it can know

crime when, for the most part, it cannot.

A central area of contemporary feminist criminological inquiry that orients around the

visual is the study of relationships between crime, media, and patriarchal norms.

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Feminist scholars working at these intersections analyze how mediated narrations

contribute to gendered understandings of crime and punishment, particularly in relation

to how women are portrayed in the media as both victims and offenders. Lynn Chancer

(2014), synthesizing several studies, argues the media articulates patriarchal messages,

reminding women to follow gendered expectations in order to avoid becoming victims of

(male) crime. However, they are not the only gendered messages in the media. In their

analysis of the film Thelma & Louise, Nicole Rafter and Michelle Brown (2011) show how

the main characters—at once victims and offenders of violence—break gender norms and

expectations. As a result, the movie is criticized for including “dangerous caricatures of

women engaging in masculine violence in order to be taken seriously” and as “degrading

to men,” but also praised for challenging patriarchal aspects of the criminal justice

system (Rafter & Brown, 2011, p. 164).

Drew Humphries’s (2009) anthology, Women, Violence and Media, illustrates

interconnections between media portrayals of violence, particularly violence against

women, the process of manufacturing media, and patriarchal social beliefs about women.

Media depictions, in turn, can influence how the audience views female victims and

offenders. For instance, Dawn Cecil (2007) finds that reality-based television programs

create sensationalized representations of women behind bars, thereby stigmatizing these

women further. Other studies find that gendered media portrayals can impact sentencing,

such as Scott Phillips, Laura Potter Haas, and James Coverdill’s (2011) analysis of how

media portrayals of female murder victims actually increases the likelihood of the death

penalty being imposed. In sum, the media contributes powerful representations of

women, both victims and offenders, that can obscure and influence their lived

experiences.

Changes in technology have expanded what constitutes “media.” This development poses

new opportunities and challenges for criminologists. According to feminist geographer

Gillian Rose (2015), a pressing concern for studying the visual is its relationship to the

digital, particularly as the two are increasingly intertwined in everyday life. Her proposal

to merge visual research methods and digital cultural studies remains largely unrealized

in feminist criminology, but there are feminist analyses of how the digital contributes to

lived experiences of crime and violence. They include studies of how social media can

affect criminal cases and instances of victimization (Milivojevic & McGovern, 2014) as well

as how digital communications can contribute to gender-based violence (Henry & Powell,

2015). Rather than render the digital as solely a space of domination, Michael Salter (2013)

argues that digital spaces, including the representations they enable, can also facilitate

counter-publics that challenge hegemonic understandings of sexual assault. Moreover,

these online practices can influence narratives conveyed through other media outlets,

legal actions, and court proceedings.

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The limited forays into contemporary relationships between the visual and the digital

point to larger questions for feminist and visual criminological analyses. Conceptually,

what frameworks help to explain how the visual permeates everyday life? How does

visuality inform gendered beliefs and practices related to crime and deviance?

Methodologically, what tools assist in capturing how the visual, including what appears

invisible, operates in different criminological contexts? If criminology does not provide

the appropriate tools for feminist visual criminological studies, what fields can? Taken

together, these questions reflect expressed worries regarding feminist criminology’s

shortcomings, particularly, as Frances Heidensohn (2012, p. 128) writes, its limited

innovation in terms of theory, the significant gaps in terms of the issues it studies, and

the continued criminological tendency to add gender as a “token acknowledgement.”

Emergent Directions of Feminist Visual

Criminology

Reflections on the future directions of feminist criminology offer guidance in terms of its

interdisciplinary possibilities, particularly as contemporary problems require new

theoretical frameworks (Henne & Troshynski, 2013). Feminist visual criminology can be

thought of in these interdisciplinary terms: as an emergent domain of investigation that

exceeds the traditional boundaries of criminology. Unlike the origins of feminist

criminology, which responded explicitly to the limitations of its patriarchal parent

discipline, analyses that bridge feminist and visual criminological concerns are diverse in

aims and epistemological orientation. Given that there are many schools of feminist

thought, the possibilities are wide-ranging and diverse. Feminist criminological

approaches to the visual may, in turn, come to look quite different—and perhaps should.

Emerging areas of study are quite diverse and include engagement with visual culture,

new media, and praxis.

Feminist Engagements with Crime, Deviance, and Visual Culture

Existing feminist criminological scholarship that engages with visual representations

convey important analytical insight. They clarify connections between data points and

highlight the application of theoretical frameworks in ways that feminist and visual

criminology cannot do alone. Underexplored areas of feminist visual analysis remain,

however. Specifically, feminist criminologists have yet to engage with interdisciplinary

debates about the scope of the visual, and technological advances may require adapting

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existing methods, theory, and praxis. This section accounts for feminist criminology’s

contributions as well as its notable silences.

Scholars of the visual draw important distinctions between vision (what we physically

see) and visuality (how we see). As Mirzoeff (2006) notes, visuality takes many forms,

including what we are allowed to see, how we interpret what we see (past and present),

and how the invisible or hidden complicates visuality. Louise Amoore’s (2007) analysis of

images related to the U.S. war on terror explicitly connects these concerns: drawing on

Judith Butler’s suggestion that the notion of the Other can be undone by the touch of

others, Amoore distinguishes between how such images are intended to be seen (that is,

as a call to be vigilant towards suspicious, possibly terrorist, activities, thus turning sight

into foresight) and how seeing them differently can subvert dominant political messages.

In contrast, as Alexa Dodge’s (2016) work attests, how viewers “read” images can also be

harmful in ways that extend victimization. Dodge (2016) documents cases where images of

sexual assaults and rapes are shared on social media and “read” as evidence of victims’

culpability rather than as evidence of a crime. As these studies show, visuality shapes not

only how one thinks about crime but also embedded power dynamics that aid the

constitution of crime.

Scholars who scrutinize the aesthetics of violence provide additional insight into the

interplay between visuality, images, and meanings attributed to acts of violence being

portrayed. Notable among them is James Pugliese’s (2007) analysis of how sexually explicit

images of U.S. torture carried out in Abu Ghraib prison reflect violence-as-spectacle, that

is, “not the collection of images” themselves, but “the social relation of people that is

mediated by images” (Debord, 1987, p. 2). The images, explains Pugliese (2007), are part of

a shadow archive, which contributes to a broader imaginary terrain that normalizes

imperialistic violence and Arab dehumanization. In the case of Abu Ghraib, the acts of

torture positioned Arab captives as passively receptive to anal penetration, a “marking

[that] is, in turn, overcoded by Orientalist fantasies designed to render the Arab male a

‘woman’” (Pugliese, 2007, p. 269). In a different vein, Ryan Ashley Caldwell (2012) analyzes

the photographs in relation to the court-martialing, specifically the two female soldiers

implicated. According to Caldwell (2012), both the performances of torture and the

punishment for those acts maintain embedded gendered messages. In particular, torture

reifies the masculine and heteronormative culture of the U.S. military, while the trial

condemned the female soldiers for participating in that culture. Taken together, the

analyses demonstrate the multiple registers of gendered violence.

Integrating feminist visual frameworks with criminological analyses promises other

theoretical innovations. The adaptation of feminist psychoanalysis, a mainstay of visual

studies, is one example. For instance, the application of Laura Mulvey’s concept of the

male gaze spans a number of fields but has had relatively little impact within feminist

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criminology. According to Mulvey (1975, p. 17), cinematic productions adopt a male

heterosexual vantage point that renders women’s bodies as the “(passive) raw material

for the (active) male gaze.” Women become objectified through the consumption of their

images, their looked-at-ness being an accepted source of pleasure. Practices of watching,

as well as being watched, reinforce patriarchal relations.

Criminologists have employed feminist psychoanalysis, and the male gaze in particular, to

explain different aspects of crime. Male expressions of vulnerability, according to Sarah

Moore and Simon Breeze (2012), center on spaces in which they are in the unfamiliar

position of being subject to the male gaze. When men felt they were in this depowered

position, a position usually occupied by women, they voiced concerns about being

threatened by crime or violence. Young (1996), too, draws upon feminist psychoanalysis to

build her central thesis about criminology’s enigmatic relationship with crime. The act of

crime, she writes, like “Woman[,] cannot be seen. Yet, like a ubiquitous ghost, she haunts

the images we believe in” (Phelan, 1993, cited in Young, 1996, p. 27). In short, no real

Woman (or crime) emerges, only an imagined notion of one.

Conceptual issues opened up by feminist visual criminology mark a scholarly departure

from mainstream criminology and an opportunity to rethink traditional feminist

paradigms. The advent of queer criminology as a growing subfield attests to how queer

theory can inform criminology. As illustrated by a special issue of Critical Criminology

(2014), queering criminology aids in not only reconsidering the field’s overall failure to

account for LGBTQI+ experiences of crime and victimization, but also in destabilizing

taken-for-granted identity-based categories, mainstream theories, and common

methodological approaches (Ball, Buist, & Woods, 2014). A queer criminology can elide

with and disrupt feminist criminology. These potentially productive contestations can

prompt reconsidering relationships between sex, gender, and sexuality; accepted feminist

concepts, praxis, and paradigms; and the multi-faceted nature of oppression.

Rebecca Lock’s (2003) work demonstrates the utility of queer theory for feminist

explanations of deviance in relation to the visual, using representations of female athletes

accused of using performance-enhancing drugs. Her work exposes the common slippage

in which “masculinity is read as lesbianism in sport. Lesbianism is read as an aesthetic

that matches the offensive aesthetic of masculinized female dopers” (Lock, 2003, p. 408).

The commendation of doping, as popularly embodied by visibly masculine women, is thus

co-constituted by the disdain for a transgressive female body, that is, a non-

heterosexually feminine woman that is undesirable to the male heterosexual gaze. In so

doing, her analysis unearths why these bodies appear “unnatural” and become targets for

criminalistic condemnation: because they embody aesthetics that defy (Western)

heteronormative norms.

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The normative claims asserted through aesthetics are important to scholarship on visual

culture, particularly in relation to crime and deviance. The racialized implications of

visual culture linked to crime and law enforcement are especially profound, yet often

overlooked by conventional criminology. For example, Jonathan Finn (2009) traces how

19th-century experiments with photography maintained a clear preoccupation with racial

difference, which directly contributed to categories used to defend racial hierarchies and

legalized strategies of racial social control. Racial anxieties and state-sanctioned violence

are inextricably linked within the histories of visual culture across many nations. Their

interplay, according to David Marriott (2007) and Katherine McKittrick (2006), “haunts”

modern visual cultures, perpetuating them in different forms. In her landmark analysis of

British imperialism, Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock (1995) traces how visual

economies communicated raced, classed, and gendered ideologies that supported empire-

building. This work provides a model for analyzing how the visual is central to

understanding postcoloniality and its earlier iterations.

Intersectional relationships also haunt the techniques employed to justify criminalistic

imaginings. These practices, argues Alan Sekula (1986), reflect an institutionalized

“physiognomic gauge,” legitimated by an archive that, alongside imaginary and pseudo-

scientific justifications, eschews different bodies as Other. As he explains, the “law-

abiding body—a body that was either bourgeois or subject to dominion” recognized “its

own acquisitive and aggressive impulses unchecked, and sought to reassure itself”; one

way to accomplish this “was the invention of a criminal who was organically distinct from

the bourgeois: a biotype” (Sekula, 1986, pp. 15–16). In fact, as Nicole Rafter (2008) details

in relation to the foundations of criminology, biological explanations of criminality are

inextricably linked to visual practices and judgments. Although not rooted in biological

theories, media and other new modes of visualization, particularly images of embodied

Others, still inform tacit knowledge of crime, law, and order by continuing legacies of

naturalizing difference. In sum, the feminist criminological analysis of the visual would be

remiss to limit its focus to gender alone, as interlocking oppressions forged contemporary

visual culture.

Feminist Criminological Engagements with New Media

Analysis of the visual increasingly looks beyond still images. The digital enables

interactive platforms through which to engage and theorize how visuality shapes subjects

of criminological study. Public Secrets, a multimedia project by Sharon Daniel (2007),

exemplifies a feminist approach that provides insight into the prison industrial complex.

Through a digital interface, the project brings together textual and audio narratives,

ambient sounds, and moving visual representations, but not realistic images of prisons or

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people occupying them. Voices of incarcerated women—voices rarely heard in public or

mainstream criminological discourses—guide users through what Daniel (2007) describes

as the “shifting borders between inside and outside, incarceration and freedom,

oppression and resistance, despair, and hope.” Public Secrets enables the user to

“see” (and hear) aspects of the criminal justice system often hidden from general view. In

sum, as a feminist project, it brings some transparency to a largely opaque institution,

even though the viewer does not see images of the actual women who narrate the

secrets.

Video games, as illustrated by Kishonna Gray (2014), provide windows in constructions and

experiences of punishment, violence, and justice. Gray’s (2014) study on the exclusion of

female video gamers, particularly gamers of color, from online communities and the

prevalence of racist and sexist violence within gaming culture highlight the need to

better conceptualize how “real” and virtual worlds are not necessarily distinct spheres,

nor is the violence enacted within and across them. Analyses of the connections between

video games, hegemonic masculinity, and U.S. military culture reiterate this point (e.g.,

Power, 2007).

Interactive documentaries (i-Docs) such as Prison Valley (Dufrense & Brault, 2010)—which

has its own smartphone app—merge the documentary style with the interactive abilities

of digital information and communication technologies. In Prison Valley, the audience can

view a documentary film with built-in “pauses” at various points so viewers can explore

certain areas in depth by clicking on representations of artifacts and people. In addition,

they can comment on and discuss the documentary with other viewers. Thus, i-Docs allow

users to engage somewhere they usually may not be able to in “real” life, enabling an

alternative imagining of criminal justice institutions that is distinctly different from

common media portrayals. Documentaries using traditional media also facilitate in-depth

analysis of criminological concerns, even though they do not provide the same user

experiences. Notable instances include a feminist narration of conditions that enable the

prison industrial complex and how the prison abolition movement resists them (e.g.,

Visions of Abolition; Chea, Granadino, & Shigematsu, 2011) and a reflection on how

documenting domestic violence can create ethical conundrums of the researcher/

photographer, bringing forth complicated questions about maintaining distance between

researcher and participant and scholar-activism more generally (e.g., Photographing

Domestic Violence; redfitz, 2015).

The performance arts serve as yet another feminist criminological mode of engaging the

visual. For example, the one-woman ethnographic play Doin’ Time: Through the Visiting

Glass, performed by scholar and dramaturge Ashley Lucas, provides an in-depth look into

how incarceration impacts families and their relationships. Jodie Michelle Lawston and

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Ashley Lucas’s (2011) edited collection, Razor Wire Women, brings together the work of

scholars, artists, activists, and prisoners—titles that are not mutually exclusive—to

investigate women’s lives and lived experiences inside prisons. These kinds of

performances, and the dialogues they facilitate, create a space where the relationship

between the corporeal and the visual are explicit, an endeavor that Young (2014) suggests

is important for visual criminology.

Calls for the development of alternative approaches within visual studies point to the

challenges of conceptualizing and analyzing contemporary modes of seeing, being seen,

and assessing what can be seeable—all of which are directly relevant, yet unexplored, by

feminist criminology. Technological advances enable the observation of phenomena and

things the naked eye cannot otherwise see. Scientific design yields new forms of

cognitive and bodily imaging, virtual engagement, geographic mapping, lighting, and

movement. A diversification and expansion of institutionalized gazes accompanies these

developments, many of which shape crime control, security, and policing practices. They

include the deployment of video and digital surveillance (Koskela, 2000; Wallace, 2009);

biometric tools, such as fingerprinting, DNA analysis, and facial recognition (Magnet,

2011; body imaging, such as x-ray and millimeter wave screening (Magnet & Rodgers,

2012); forensic evidence visualization and analysis techniques (Haldar, 2013); and geo-

coding software and tracking (Wallace, 2009). To borrow a term coined by Hille Koskela

(2000), “the gaze without eyes” is a mainstay of contemporary life. With it comes a number

of tools that mediate and alter sight, the analysis of which could challenge and extend

gendered analyses of the gaze.

The expansion of visualization devices contributes to what Rachel Hall (2007) refers to as

an overarching “aesthetics of transparency” that entails extensive surveillance practices,

many of which come to disproportionately affect non-Western and feminine bodies. In a

post-9/11 world, the Western desire to make bodies transparent, particularly those of

Muslim—or presumed-Muslim—individuals, is manifest in a variety of disclosure

strategies, such as Orientalist moves to unveil or see beneath women wearing the burqa

or niqab, as well as rules that compel travelers to pose for x-ray scanners that generate

images of their naked bodies under the guise of security (Magnet & Rodgers, 2012). In

addition, as evidenced by analyses of U.S. drone strikes, visualizations directly inform

combat tactics and contribute to new ways of dehumanizing citizens in other parts of the

world (Wall & Monahan, 2011). The distance enabled by transmitting images of faraway

targets facilitates continued warfare; deaths of innocents are more readily relabeled as

akin to enemy combatants. Perhaps more importantly, as Tyler Wall and Torin Monahan

(2011) state, these mobilizations of the image reorient techniques of neutralization,

reframing potential acts of crime or terrorism as justified war-related violence.

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The technological integrations changing fields of visuality inevitably impact how different

actors see crime, as well as how they respond to and anticipate it. Applications for

personal use, such as Google mapping software and crime-tracking smartphone apps, as

well as larger software projects, such as the Risk Terrain Modeling software developed at

Rutgers University (2012) to assist with predictive policing practices, are just a few

examples. For Aurora Wallace (2009), these technologies aid in reimagining crime’s

relationship to geographic space, casting illegal activities as a wider visual space.

However, as Allen Feldman (2005) writes, this is not limited to geography or crime.

Instead, he suggests, social practices of in/visibility reflect what he calls an “actuarial

gaze,” which yield “zones of visual editing, structural invisibility, and cordon sanitaire”

that cumulatively result “in the deceasing capacity of surveilled, stigmatized, and

vulnerable groups, classified as risk-bearers, to make visible their social suffering,

shrinking life-chances and human rights claims in the global public sphere” (Feldman,

2005, p. 213). These broader cultural shifts, constitutively linked to the visual, point to the

importance of the reflexive traditions of feminist and critical visual analyses: the stakes of

conventional criminology becoming complicit in the proliferation of such technological

advances without critically reflecting on the broader implications threaten to undermine

democratic engagement.

Feminist Criminological Praxis and the Visual

Questions of praxis, which encompass ethics and pedagogy in addition to research,

foreground feminist criminological engagement with the visual. Visual studies, as Brown

(2014, p. 193) acknowledges, employs a wide analytical frame and a number of techniques,

including “social and cultural imaginaries; visual hierarchies, economies, and ocular

logics; trending images, conceptual maps, and data visualizations; all in order to

foreground the visual frames and optics by which we see … and do not see.” This

“expansive and emergent vocabulary,” she contends, “allows us to explore and articulate

in a more nuanced manner the stakes of seeing and understanding our subject, ourselves,

and our commitments in a plurality of ways” (Brown, 2014, p. 194). Prompting a

reconsideration of the researcher’s relationships to her objects of inquiry enables an

extension of feminist criminology’s reflexive tradition.

Reflexivity—at least as typically thought of in relation to constructing textual narratives

based on qualitative research—may not be adequate when engaging and analyzing the

visual. As scholars using visual methods note, capturing images complicates issues

related to anonymity, confidentiality, consent, and overt versus covert methods (Davidov,

2004; Pauwels, 2008). Using existing images from the Internet can also blur the line

between public and private domains, making traditional ethical standards an incomplete

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source for guidance (Markham, 2006). However, as feminists of color have long argued,

privacy is not a clear-cut right or sphere of social activity; rather it is a relational

privilege that not everyone can enjoy. By heeding these and other feminist insights,

feminist criminologists, armed with a tradition of reflexive praxis and recognition of

interlocking systems of power, are well positioned to advance a more radical reflexive

approach.

In addition to researcher reflexivity, cultural studies scholars have called for further

interrogation of viewing practices, not simply visual artifacts (Bal, 2003; Mirzoeff, 2011).

Mirzoeff (2011) argues that accounting for the difference and disparities among onlookers

should be central to analyses of meaning, particularly how diverse gazes become instilled

through visual encounters—be they informed by sexuality, gender, political economy,

discipline, postcoloniality, or intersections between them. This extends Young’s (2014, p.

161) point that visual criminology should “avoid the pitfalls of an object-centered

approach to the image” by moving toward a criminological aesthetics that scrutinizes the

constitutive relationships shaping the visual as they crystallize around the encounter

between the viewer and the image. Moreover, there are ethical dimensions to critical

viewing practices and visual analysis. Writing in relation to human rights discourse,

Wendy Hesford (2011) explains that even well-intended messages can maintain imbalanced

power dynamics. Specifically, she focuses on the relationships between the spectacles of

human rights violations and the audience of presumed human rights bearers who witness

them through mediated and visual modes. According to Hesford (2011, p. 46), in addition

to considering how the visual communicates messages about crime, atrocity, and

violence, many of which are gendered, there is an obligation to “call into question the

normative frameworks that govern subject formation and the scenes of suffering.”

Feminist visual criminological approaches, then, are in a unique position to engage with

critical viewing practices and adjoining questions of how visuality and ethics overlap.

In addition to ethics, visual pedagogy offers ways for criminologists to advance feminist

analyses of crime. Drawing from critical pedagogy, visual pedagogy scrutinizes the way

audiovisuals and graphics contribute to knowledge production (Goldfarb, 2002). Doing so

allows for a critique of the visual and how it informs political and social transformation. It

also brings a critical focus on how images can serve as pedagogical tools and on new

technologies meant to “streamline and cross-cut” educational delivery (Goldfarb, 2002, p.

6). In many ways, the goals of visual pedagogy align with those of feminist pedagogy.

Both seek to question taken-for-granted “truths,” how they are fashioned, and how they

become reproduced in educational settings. As Rafter and Brown (2011, p. ix) note,

connecting criminological theories to film analysis provides meaningful ways for students

to relate to and “visualize the theories in action.” Similarly, Elizabeth Jenkins (1992, p.

341) argues that documentary films can help students develop “sophisticated techniques

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for questioning what they are shown and told about gender issues and stereotypes in the

administration of justice.” A visual feminist pedagogy thus enables reconsidering tacit

beliefs about crime, crime control, and crime prevention, while helping students develop

critical skills for engaging the visual in the everyday life.

The ethical and pedagogical dimensions of praxis point to longstanding feminist concerns

regarding essentialism. Essentialism, in the traditional feminist sense, renders gendered

differences as innate, the outgrowth of inherent or biological traits. Feminist anti-

essentialist praxis aims to counteract these tacit assumptions. With regard to studies of

visual culture, Mieke Bal (2003, p. 19) cautions that scholars “must seriously engage both

terms in their negativity: ‘visual’ as ‘impure’—synesthetic, discursive and pragmatic; and

‘culture’ as shifting, differential, located between ‘zones of culture’ and performed in

practices of power and resistance.” In other words, researchers should be attuned to the

risks of privileging what can be seen and rendering culture as static or even monolithic.

These concerns become compounded when considered in relation to the objects of

feminist criminological analysis, which are etched and shaped by interconnected

patriarchal, heteronormative, and postcolonial power relationships. Already marginalized

bodies can appear hypervisible (Fleetwood, 2011), rendered deviant or criminalistic, while

privileged bodies can go unseen because they benefit from structures that shape the

frames through which we see crime. Privilege—by design—may fall outside the frame, but

it nonetheless influences visual planes, conditioning what and how bodies can be seen.

Bal (2003, p. 22) calls for an anti-essentialist visual cultural studies that deconstructs the

“master narratives that are presented as natural, universal, true, and inevitable, and

dislodge them so that alternative narratives can become visible” and aims to “understand

some of the motivations of visual essentialism, which promotes the look of the knower

(Foucault) while keeping it invisible.” Recognizing that conventional criminology fails to

reflexively interrogate its role in creating essentialist views towards gender, crime, and

crime control, feminist criminologists employ a number of analytical “checks,” among

them intersectionality, that highlight the importance of contextual conditions. They help

to “make sure that we do not speak for those who cannot speak or ask others to share our

agenda while they wait for their own” (Grillo, 1995, p. 30). As this article shows, there are

several feminist and critical approaches to the visual that share feminist criminology’s

anti-essentialist commitments. Using these approaches can bolster its ability to unveil

interlocking oppressions and their bearing on crime, deviance, and violence.

Links to Digital Materials

Ashkenazi, N. (Director). (2012). [DVD]. New York: Women Make Movies.

Benalioulhaj, A. (Director). (2012). . Available from .

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Bissell, E. (Director). (2012). .

Daniel, S. (2007). . Vectors: Journal of Culture and Dynamic Vernacular, 2(2).

Dufrense, D. (Director), & Brault, A. (Producer). (2010). .

Further Reading

Bal, M. (2003). Visual essentialism and the object of visual culture. Journal of Visual

Culture, 2(1), 5–32.

Brennan, P. K., Chesney-Lind, M., Vandenberg, A. L., & Wulf-Ludden, T. (2015). . Radical

Criminology, 5(1).

Britton, D. (2000). Feminism in criminology: Engendering the outlaw. Annals of the

American Academy of Political and Social Science, 571, 57–76.

Brown, M. (2014). Visual criminology and carceral studies: Counter-images in the

carceral age. Theoretical Criminology, 18(2), 176–197.

Brown, M., & Carrabine, E. (Eds.). (2017). Routledge international handbook of visual

criminology. London: Routledge.

Butler, J. (2009). Frames of war: When is life grievable? New York: Verso.

Cain, M. (2000). Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the sociology of crime. British Journal of

Criminology, 40(2), 239–260.

Daly, K. (1997). Different ways of conceptualizing sex/gender in feminist theory and their

implications for criminology. Theoretical Criminology, 1(1), 25–51.

Dikovitskaya, M. (2006). Visual culture: The study of the visual after the cultural turn.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dirks, D., Heldman, C., & Zack, E. (2015). “She’s hot and she’s white so she can’t be

guilty”: Female criminality, penal spectatorship, and white protectionism. Contemporary

Justice Review, 18(2), 160–177.

Dubrofsky, R. E., & Magnet, S. A. (Eds.). (2015). Feminist surveillance studies. Durham,

NC: Duke University Press.

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Finn, J. (2009). Capturing the criminal image: From mug shot to surveillance society.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Feldman, A. (2015). Archives of the insensible: Of war, photopolitics, and dead memory.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Flavin, J. (2001). Feminism for the mainstream criminologist: An invitation. Journal of

Criminal Justice, 29(4), 271–285.

Hayward, K., & Presdee, M. (Eds.). (2010). Framing crime: Cultural criminology and the

image. London: Routledge.

Hoffman, B. (2015, November). . Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American

Society of Criminology, Washington, DC.

Magnet, S. A. (2011). When biometrics fail: Gender, race, and the technology of identity.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Manderson, D. (2015). Bodies on the water: On reading images more sensibly. Law &

Literature, 27(2), 279–293.

Margolis, E., & Pauwels, L. (Eds.). (2011). The SAGE handbook of visual research

methods. London: SAGE.

Mirzoeff, N. (2011). The right to look: A counterhistory of visuality. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.

Mitchell, W. J. T. (1986). Iconology: Image, text, ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.

Rafter, N. (2006). Shots in the mirror: Crime films and society (2d ed.). New York: Oxford

University Press.

Rafter, N., & Brown, M. (2011). Criminology goes to the movies: Crime theory and

popular culture. New York: New York University Press.

Rodgers, R. (2013). Digital methods. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Rose, G. (2014). On the relation between “visual research methods” and contemporary

visual culture. The Sociological Review, 62(1), 24–46.

Sontag, S. (2003). Regarding the pain of others New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Young, A. (1996). Imagining crime: Textual outlaws and criminal conversations. London:

SAGE.

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Kathryn Henne

School of Regulation and Global Governance, Australian National University

Rita Shah

Elizabethtown College

Picturing Subjugated Knowledge

Chapter

Full-text available

Aug 2017

Nicola Harding

Constructing the everyday experiences of women subject to punishment in the community as subjugated knowledge poses methodological challenges that feminist criminology and visual criminology have the potential to overcome. By examining a Participatory Action Research (PAR) cycle run with women subject to offender supervision and community punishment, this paper identifies the potential for visual, creative, and participatory methods as a way of uncovering the hidden life experiences of some of the most marginalised in society. Exposing such experiences can offer a meaningful critique of the way the criminal justice system in England and Wales treats women with convictions, and how this contributes to their ability to craft crime free futures.

Photo Documentation While Brown: Fear and Data Collection in (white male) USA

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2023

Rita Shah

In late summer of 2018, I embarked on a project that involved analyzing probation and parole offices. The original purpose was to understand how architectural features of these offices keep them hidden from the public. As no such data set existed, I created my own by driving to offices and photographing them. This paper discusses the challenges of conducting this photo documentation project, paying special attention to how concerns of fear and safety impacted the data-generation process. I provide an embodied account of how my personhood relates to a social science research question and offer a methodological intervention on the risks of conducting visual criminological studies. I conclude by discussing the broader implications for qualitative criminological research and the field.

Body-Worn Cameras, Police Violence and the Politics of Evidence: A Case of Ontological Gerrymandering

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2022
CRIT SOC POLICY

Public demands for greater police accountability, particularly in relation to violence targeting Black and Brown communities, have placed pressure on law enforcement organisations to be more transparent about officers’ actions. The implementation of police body-worn cameras (BWCs) has become a popular response. This paper examines the embrace of BWCs amidst the wider shift toward evidence-based policing by scrutinising the body of research that evaluates the effects of these technologies. Through an intertextual analysis, we illustrate how the privileging of certain forms of empiricism, particularly randomised controlled trials, evinces what Woolgar and Pawluch describe as ontological gerrymandering. In doing so, the emergent evidence base supporting BWCs as a policing tool constitutively redefines police violence into a narrow conceptualisation rooted in encounters between citizens and police. This analysis examines how these framings, by design, minimise racialised power relations and inequalities. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of these evidence-based claims, arguing that evidence can direct attention away from—and thus can buttress—the structural conditions and institutions that perpetuate police violence.

Reading the Body-Worn Camera as Multiple: A Reconsideration of Entities as Enactments

Chapter

Full-text available

May 2020

Body-worn cameras (BWCs) often emerge as technologies that can be used in the service of transparency, accountability, and reform. Accordingly, the framing of these devices presents them as objects that can impact social dynamics. However, as scholars of surveillance and science and technology studies (STS) remind us, such objects are not fixed or static entities. Instead, they come into being through sociotechnical entanglements. This chapter extends analytic insights from STS by reconsidering common descriptions of BWCs and their repercussions in wider debates. It discusses representations of BWCs and how STS reflections on the ontological turn challenge these characterizations, doing so by querying them as objects that become enacted in and through practice. We illustrate how BWCs come into being through an analysis of the 2016 killing of Paul O’Neal, an unarmed 18-year old Black man, by Chicago police officers. By adapting the situated approach employed by Woolgar and Lezaun, the case reveals how BWCs cannot be separated from the inequitable and violent power relationships that are part of their enactment. The chapter concludes with a reflection on how this rethinking of politics through ontology has potentially profound implications for discussions of accountability, discretion, and privacy.

The Critical Foundations of Visual Criminology: The State, Crisis, and the Sensory

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2019
Crit Criminol

This article considers the manner in which visual criminology has flourished in the current moment, while exploring its foundational relations and points of distinction as a form of critical criminology. In particular, we devote attention to the relationship of images to control, power and resistance at a time defined by the spectacular proliferation of media. We also discuss new and recent directions in visual criminology that enlarge our understandings of both critical and visual work, including forensic architecture and sensory criminology.

Why feminist criminology must pose a methodological challenge to male-centred criminological theory

Chapter

Full-text available

Jul 2017

Nicola Harding

The purpose of this chapter is to consider the contribution that feminist criminology can offer to understandings of women’s lived experience of community punishment. Particularly, how the use of Participatory Action Research (PAR) can pose a methodological challenge to theories that have been conceived and developed within the context of a male-centered criminology. Specifically, this piece will examine the role of relationships within current desistance theory. Arguing that the complex nature of the role of victimization and resistance to victimization has not been fully explored in relation to female desistance. Drawing upon evidence collected during a PAR cycle1 with women subject to community punishments in North West England, an argument will be made that whilst some characteristics of desistance theory are shared across gender lines, many aspects are male focused and inadequately explain the processes of women desisting from crime.

Article

Feb 2022

While feminist and queer epistemologies in criminology have similar origins, dissimilarities based on key dimensions exist, with significant impacts for qualitative methods and methods education. Our article first explores approaches to qualitative methods that generally overlap between feminist and queer epistemologies, such as social change goals, common research methods, and intersectional analyses. We then focus on two broad examples to demonstrate how queer criminology and second-wave feminism diverge. Several recent incidents have crystallized a distinction between transgender inclusivity within queer criminology and transgender exclusivity motivated by trans-exclusionary radical feminism within feminist criminology. We also highlight sex-positive criminological approaches situated within queer criminology, which advocate broadly for decriminalization and harm reduction, compared to second-wave feminist approaches that view considerations of sex and sexuality differently. Lastly, we discuss topics that represent both convergence and divergence, such as the radical possibilities of both feminist and queer criminologies for abolitionist scholarship and methodology, while noting recent examples of the ways criminologists have or have not explored these possibilities. Throughout, we connect the theoretical and the methodological, illustrating the practical realities these similarities and dissimilarities lead to in qualitative research. Our discussion is rooted in principles of inclusive and intersectional pedagogy.

Body-worn images: Point-of-view and the new aesthetics of policing

Article

Sep 2019
Crime Media Cult

Police organisations across much of the Western world have eagerly embraced body-worn video camera technology, seen as a way to enhance public trust in police, provide transparency in policing activity, reduce conflict between police and citizens and provide a police perspective of incidents and events. Indeed, the cameras have become an everyday piece of police ‘kit’. Despite the growing ubiquity of the body-worn video camera, understandings of the nature and value of the audiovisual footage produced by police remain inchoate. Given body-worn video camera’s promise of veracity, this article is interested in the aesthetics of the camera images and the socio-cultural construction of the cameras as tellers of truth. We treat body-worn video cameras as image-making devices linked to techniques and technologies of power, which construct and frame police encounters in specific ways, and we suggest that the aesthetics and point-of-view nature of the image contribute greatly to the truth-value that the images acquire. This article begins by providing an historical context for the use of cameras and images in policing. We then introduce our framework of visual criminology and present theories of point-of-view as a construct in the diverse areas of gaming, pornography and the visual arts, as well as in television and cinema. The article deploys the cinematic use of point-of-view to unpack the affective impact and aesthetic of the police body-worn video camera footage. We suggest that viewers of the footage are placed in the position of the corporeally absent police officer whose experience has been recorded by a viewfinderless device. This generates a vacillating interplay between subjectivity and objectivity, given that the alleged faithful recording of the event by the body-worn video camera presents a singular perspective and incomplete document that may not necessarily capture the full context of the law enforcement event.

The Differential Representation of Latina and Black Female Victims in Front-Page News Stories: A Qualitative Document Analysis

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2017
Fem Criminol

Critical race feminists posit that perceptions of White and minority females differ, which suggests that media representations will vary among female crime victims. To explore this proposition, we examined front-page crime stories from four different U.S. newspapers using Altheide’s approach to qualitative document analysis. We found that stories about White female victims received more repeated coverage and were more likely to contain sympathetic narratives than stories about Latina/Black female victims. In contrast, Latina/Black female victims were more likely to be portrayed as risk-takers and “bad” women, and their victimization was normalized through descriptions of their unsafe environments.

Fallgirls: Gender and the Framing of Torture at Abu Ghraib

Book

Full-text available

Apr 2016

Ryan Ashley Caldwell

The Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Crime

Article

May 2014

Research on gender, sex, and crime today remains focused on topics that have been a mainstay of the field for several decades, but it has also recently expanded to include studies from a variety of disciplines, a growing number of countries, and on a wider range of crimes. The Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Crime reflects this growing diversity and provides authoritative overviews of current research and theory on how gender and sex shape crime and criminal justice responses to it. The editors, Rosemary Gartner and Bill McCarthy, have assembled a diverse cast of criminologists, historians, legal scholars, psychologists, and sociologists from a number of countries to discuss key concepts and debates central to the field. The Handbook includes examinations of the historical and contemporary patterns of women's and men's involvement in crime; as well as biological, psychological, and social science perspectives on gender, sex, and crimal activity. Several essays discuss the ways in which sex and gender influence legal and popular reactions to crime. An important theme throughoutThe Handbook is the intersection of sex and gender with ethnicity, class, age, peer groups, and community as influences on crime and justice. Individual chapters investigate both conventional topics - such as domestic abuse and sexual violence - and topics that have only recently drawn the attention of scholars - such as human trafficking, honor killing, gender violence during war, state rape, and genocide. The Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Crime offers an unparalleled and comprehensive view of the connections among gender, sex, and crime in the United States and in many other countries. Its insights illuminate both traditional areas of study in the field and pathways for developing cutting-edge research questions.

Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness

Book