Feminist Critique of Classical Criminology

libber Critique of Classical CriminologyThe wo custodys rightist review article of classical criminology has decocted first on the marginalization of wo workforce in its studies and secondly on the contention that when women atomic number 18 studied, it is in a peculiarly limited and distorting fashion. Attempts to construct a distinctly womens liberationist criminology tolerate been do with use of methodologies including sensationalism and rack speculation. However, these theories accommodate received criticism for their essentia keep down effronterys and habitual claims. The feminist criminological theories detailed in this opinion wipe out resulted from these criticisms and focus on postmodern ideas which consider more than(prenominal) c atomic number 18fully how categories of personal identity ar constituted and how office relates to friendship. Particular attention will be habituated to the impact of Foucauldian plans of normalisation and disciplinin g situation on the explanations of young-bearing(prenominal) con frame of rootity and deviance. Discourses on hegemonic maleness which crap grown from feminist epistemologies and methodologies will similarly be addressed.For e very(prenominal) iodine hundred males convicted of serious offences on that mind be solitary(prenominal) 18 females so convicted. Age and get off remain the best predictors for nuisance and delinquency better than class, race or employment status.(heidensohn, 1995, p143)1. The cryst on the wholeise of criminology has been increasingly criticised by feminists and pro-feminist writers for its want of grammatical gender analysis. As Ngaire Naffine has asserted, the costs to criminology of its failure to get laid with feminist scholarship be perhaps more severe than they would be in any other tally.(Naffine, p6)2The reason be that the most accordant and prominent fact astir(predicate) crime is the sex of the breacher. As a rule, crime is some thing that men do, non women, so the denial of the gender capitulum and the dismissal of feminists who wish to tease it out seems in particular perverse.(Naffine. 1996, p6)3The land of belles-lettres on criminology would suggest that it is a discipline of academic men ordurevas twist men and, at best, it would appear that women represent only a specialism, not the standard f ar. .(Naffine. 1996, p1)4Similarly feminism as a substantial body of cordial, political and philosophical thought, does not feature prominently in conventional criminological writing. Feminism in its more ambitious and prestigious mode is not employed in the write up of men, which is the central tune of criminology. The message to the reader is thus that feminism is around women, while criminology is about men. (Naffine. 1996, p2)5Naffine has stated, the neglect of women in much mainstream criminology has, be stimulate, skewed criminological thinking in a quite particular elan. It has stopped cr iminologists seeing the sex of their subjects, bargonly because men commence occupied and colonised all of the terrain. (Naffine. 1996, p8)6Traditional criminology which has desire to explain female cruelity has been almost summarily jilted by feminists. The feminist inspection of classical criminology was inaugurated by Carol Smart who rejected the biological positivist account of abominableity propounded by Lombroso and Ferrero. Smart contended that the rough-cut stance, which unites classical theorists, is based upon a particular misconception of the innate character and personality of women, which is in stave founded upon a biological determinist impersonate.(Smart. 1977, p27)7The emphasis on the determined character of hu humanness deportment, asserted Smart, is not peculiar to the discipline of criminology, or to the study of women, scarcely is particularly pertinent to the study of female execrableity because of the widely-held and popular belief in the non-cog nitive, physiological basis of condemnable actions by women.8Feminist criminologists sought to touch on the inadequacies of traditionalistic criminology through freshly methodologies and research. Two of the earliest and most prominent schools of thought were feminist empiricism and outdoor stage feminism.Much of the early writing of feminists in criminology assumed the methods and assumptions of empiricist criminology. The look up of these early feminists was that women had been left out of the research of scientists and the result was a inescapably skewed and distorted science.9It accounted for men and explained their behaviour in a unmitigated and scientific way, only when it did not account for women, though it purported to do so. Feminist criminologists pointed out the blatant sexism of this double standard and argued that women and men should receive the same(p) scientific treatment. Harding labels this method of thought feminist empiricism.10To feminist empiricists, scientific claims ar thought to be realisable, hardly have not yet been civil in semblance to women. Feminist empiricists alleged that classical criminologists had not considered the effects of their own biases and preconceptions on their execution on what they chose to do, how they did it, and what they present of it.11Thus feminist empiricists endeavour to develop a scientific understanding of women as the scatty subjects of criminology, to document their lives both as offenders and as victims. They raise objections to the empirical claims grime about women, when those claims atomic number 18 based on meagre evidence, with a strong sprinkling of prejudice.12Naffine has suggested that the principle shortcoming of feminist empiricism is its tendency to buy the farm the rest of the discipline in say, unanalysed and unchallenged.13The underlying assumption is that criminology is in some manner fitted and impartial when it is not dealing with women and so the gendered n ature of criminal right and the criminal in force(p)ice system remains unexamined. The empirical methods and the epistemological assumptions of traditional criminology atomic number 18 generally allowed to stand, as argon its understandings of men. Feminist empiricism, therefore, fails to ask about the significance of institutions which have been organised around men.14Another feminist criminology which was constructed from the critique of classical theory was base feminism. stall feminism contended that criminologys continuing immersion with the viewpoint of men was a function of indicant. For standpoint feminists, the solution to criminologys ignorance of womens experiences was to turn to women themselves and seek their own accounts of the criminal experience. As Carol Smart has disc all overthe epistemological basis of this system of feminist knowledge is experiencefeminist experience is achieved through a struggle against burdensomeness it is, therefore, argued to be more complete and less distorted than the perspective of the ruling group of men. A feminist standpoint then is not just the experience of women, but of women reflexively engaged in struggle. In this function it is argued that a more perfect or fuller version of reality is achieved. This stance does not break open knowledge from values and politics but sees knowledge arising from engagement.15Thus the bankers acceptance of the standpoint of women is fundamentally a moral and political act of committedness to understanding the world from the perspective of the accessiblely subjugated. It assumes that the identity of the subject matters the epistemological site of the fair sex from below provides better insights into her condition. Thus, standpoint theorists attempt to keep out the gap between the knower and the known.16Pat Carlen has do use of standpoint theory in her research want to invest the female offender with the sort of rationality and purpose which had previously only been found in the male offender.17Carlen took an unusual step by literally making the criminal women who formed the subject of her study the authors of their own stories.18One of Carlens stated purposes was to make us realise that the criminality of women is serious and intentional.19Other standpoint theorists have suggested that the viewpoint of women provides a more secure grasp of certain aspects of reality, particularly the realities of disadvantages and political oppression than the standpoint of men. Standpoint theory can in addition be used effectively to play up the injuries d iodine to women as victims of crime. Standpoint feminism is by its nature democratic, its subversive potential does not cipher on the academic credentials of the author.20 notwithstanding the contribution of standpoint theory to feminist criminology critics of this methodology have not failed to highlight its manifest inadequacies. These inadequacies let in a lack of constituency and the tenden cy of standpoint feminism to universalise the year woman.These ar the interrogatorys which standpoint feminism has no clear answer to. The flightiness of a womans standpoint, the suggestion that women as a category possess a particular and superior view of the world, is necessarily to select just one of the many viewing points from which women look on the world, and then to impose that one view on all.21These criticisms and others have been highlighted most eloquently by opprobrious and Third World feminists.Marcia sift has taken issue with mainstream feminist criminology incriminate it of being blind to its own essentialising tendencies.Given the history and theoretical objectives of feminist criminology, one big businessman have assumed that the monolithic, unidimensional perspectives employed by traditional theorists would have been abandoned for a more dynamic woo.22However, Rice contends, almost without exception, feminist criminological research from 1960 to the prese nt has focused on white female offenders. Sexist images of women have been challenged, but racist stereotypes have largely been handle.23While there has been some acknowledgement that black women are not dealt with in the same way as white women, no research has been carried out which compares the sentences of black and white women.24This is an of import point as a failure to consider the potentially different experiences of black women whitethorn invalidate the research findings. Race whitethorn be as important as gender, if not more so.25Rice has also criticised the perceived assumption in much feminist criminological writing that all women are equally disadvantaged. For example ODwyer, Wilson and Carlen write Women in prison suffer all the same deprivation, indignities and degradations as male prisoners. Additionally they suffer other hassles that are specific to them as imprisoned women.26Rice contends that this statement is inadequate as it stands. It fails to acknowledge t he added problems of the isolation of and discrimination against black women. Bryan et al, for example, point to the fact that a higher percentage of black than white women in prison are on prescribed psychotropic drugs.27This requires explanation. Furthermore, many black women serving big sentences are not indigenous but are from West Africa and are serving sentences for drug offences. These groups of female prisoners in Britain are often awaiting deportation and have special needs for example, contact is usually severed with their families and there are problems of communication.28Thus, asserts Rice, feminist criminologists have developed a theoretical approach which emphasises the significance of patriarchal oppression and sexist ideologic practices. The main problem with this is that, in assuming a universal dimension of mens power, this approach has ignored the fact that race significantly affects black womens experiences in the home, in the agitate market, and of the crimin al justice system.29Criminologists have responded in many ways to the concerns of standpoint theorists. The responses focused on in this essay are those which pursue the intelligent problems generated by standpoint theory, and so consider more carefully how categories of identity are constituted and how power relates to knowledge.An examination of female criminality and unsanctioned deviance suggests that we need to move away from studying infractions and look at conformity instead, because the most striking thing about female criminal behaviour on the basis of all the evidence is how notably conformist to cordial mores women are.30Increasingly feminist criminologists have turned to postmodern (and poststructuralist) explanations of the way power and knowledge intersect to air normalisation techniques and womens social and legal conformity. Many of these theories and methodologies have been based on the work of influential French philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault has argu ed that disciplinal power acts on the mortal body in stray to render it more powerful, productive, useful and docile. Foucaults genealogies seek to give an account of how our ways of thinking and doing dominate and control us.31In modern ships company disciplinal power has spread through the production of certain forms of knowledge, such as the positivistic human sciences, and through the emergence of disciplinary techniques of surveillance, and examination which facilitates the process of obtaining knowledge about individuals. Disciplinary practices create the divisions healthy/ill, sane/mad which by virtue of their authoritative statuses can be used as effective means of normalisation.32Disciplinary power secures its hold by created desires, attaching individuals and their behaviour to specific identities, and establishing norms against which individuals and their behaviours and bodies are judged and against which they police themselves.33Prevailing notions of identity and s ubjectivity are maintained and created not through violence or active irresistible impulse but by individual self-surveillance.Thus,There is no need for arms, bodily violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end up by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual this exercising their surveillance over, and against himself34Forms of knowledge such as criminology, psychiatry and philanthropy are directly think to the exercise of power, while power itself creates red-hot objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information. Foucaults description of disciplinary power has allowed feminist criminologists to exact a resounding critique on feminisms which have utilised structural accounts of patriarchal power. It has also prompted these criminologists to question the diverse relationships that women occupy in relation to the social field consisting of eight-fold sites of pow er and resistance.Feminists have used Foucaults analytics of power to demo how the motley strategies of oppression around the female body from ideologic representations of femininity to concrete procedures of effort and bodily control are central to the maintenance of hierarchical social relations.35A pertinent example of feminist criminological research which has bring out the use of panoptic techniques on women has been done by Pat Carlen who interviewed 15 Scottish sheriffs on their handling of women who were charged and imprisoned for criminal offences.36Carlen find the considerable degree of embarrassment in the sheriffs feelings when a woman appeared in court as accused. They seemed to feel uneasy first because they knew that the women were being dealt with in a highly inappropriate penal tariff system to which they could not respond and second because of the womens design as mothers. The conflict was pickd by the sheriffs differentiating between good and bad mothers . The sheriffs then redefine the prison to which the women are sent with all the appropriate paraphernalia of security and restraint, as a comfortable place, suitable for a spot of kindly paternal discipline (emphasis added).37Thus disciplinary power works to examine, diagnose and reform criminal women whilst the sheriff fulfills the role of normalising judge.Colin Sumner has provided an insightful exposition of Foucauldian normalisation in his work on gender and the censure of deviance.38Normalising power works through the norm, which is a categorization of legality and nature, prescription and constitution,39to produce a physics of a relational and multiple power, which has its maximum intensity not in the person of the King, but in the bodies that can be individualised by these relations.40It does not supersede law, rather law is subsumed the law operates more and more as a norm, the judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum or apparatuses whose functio ns are for the most part regulatory.41Discipline supports law, by its system of micro power and neutralises counter-power or resistance with the principle of mildness-production-profit rather than the levy of violence. Normalisation involves, then, a combination and generalisation of panoptic techniques subsuming other forms of power.42Examples of the practical implications for women who transgress the norms of sex-role expectations can be found in research which details the excessive sharpness of the courts when dealing with women offenders.43Women defendants seem strange and less comprehensible than men they offend both against societys behavioural rules about property, drinking, or violence and also against the more fundamental norms which govern sex-role behaviour. The differentiation between the sexes is scaled to protect girls from themselves, but it allows boys to be boys.44Thus through techniques of normalisation, a complex composition of hegemonic, and therefore social, ce nsures emerged and, eventually, became the foundation of positivist and administrative forms of criminology.45Normalisation is presented as a outline which produces a disciplined individual who is normally so unaware of the place of individualisation in the general strategies of domination that s/he operates at heart the illusion of a rationalistic voluntarism, while performing the economic, political, sexual and ideological roles required by sustained capital accumulation and bourgeois hegemony.46patronage its appeal to and appropriation by many feminists, Sumner has criticised Foucaults concept of normalisation for glossing over the role of the censure of women and femininity in the hegemonic ideologies constituting the political and economic role of the state.47Indeed, Sumner contends, the formation of the modern subject is a profoundly gendered process, as and so is the formation of the modern state. Modern social censures and forms of social regulation are fundamentally gend ered.48As Catherine MacKinnon has saidThe state is male in a feminist senseThe liberal state coercively and authoritively constitutes the social order in the interests of men as a gender, through its legitimising norms, relation to society, and substantive policies.49Sumner criticises the lack of analysis of mens domination, patriarchy and hegemonic masculinist ideologies in Foucaults understanding of the concepts of right, justice, contract and agency.50The state form itself is profoundly masculine in that its fundamental organising concepts, institutions, procedures and strategies are historically imbued with, and are themselves descriptive of, an ideological notion of maleness that is hegemonic and that this hegemonic masculinity which contributes to the very form of state power, is not so much an effect of mens economic power as an overdetermined historical condensation of the economic, political and ideological power of ruling-class men.51Thus, it must be observed that the normalisation process concomitant with capitalist development contains with it the censure of the feminine and of deviant masculinities. This censure is part of the dominant ideological knowledge that the powerful try to invest in the practices and thus the bodies of subjects.52This notion of hegemonic masculinity which Sumner highlights in his critique of Foucault is a growing area of criminological research which draws on feminist theory and postmodern critique and it seeks to interrogate the gender question behind the criminality of men. The study of masculinities in a criminological context was inaugurated by Australian criminologist tag Connell.53one very important new topic is already on the agenda masculinity..If emphasis on gender is a key aspect of feminist work, then the further study of masculinity must be vital. Without it there will be no progress.54Criminologists seeking to realign the gender question within criminology have sought an understanding of the crimes of m en through reference to a rather different conceptualisation of masculinity not just that the crimes of individual men might be explained through reference to their masculinity, but rather the idea that society itself is presently experiencing what has been termed a crisis of masculinity, a crisis made manifest in both the changing nature and extent of mens criminality.55Criminology for so long the bum of feminist critique as the apotheosis of a masculinist discipline in terms of its epistemological assumptions, methodology and institutional practices, might at last appear to be addressing its very own sex question by seeking to engage with the sexed specificity of its object of study the fact that crime is, overwhelming, an activity engaged in by men.56The target of feminist critiques of the discipline which have emerged during the past 20 years has been with the nature of this recognition, the way in which the sex-specificity of crime has been conceptualised.How is it possible t o recognise the diversity of mens lives whilst also recognising the existence of a culturally exalted form of masculinity? For Bob Connell the answer lies in the concept of hegemonic masculinity, which is always constructed in relation to various subordinated masculinities as well as in relation to women.57Central to hegemonic masculinity is the idea that a variety of masculinities can be ordered hierarchically. sex activity relations, Connell argues, are constituted through three interrelated structures labour, power and cathexis. What gild exists between them is not that of a system but, rather, a unity or historical composition. What is produced is a gender order, a historically constructed pattern of power relation between men and women and definitions of femininity and masculinity.58The politics of masculinity cannot be confined to the level of the personal. They are also embedded in the gender regime, part of the organisational sexuality of institutions and society generally .59The construction of hegemonic masculinity as a unifying and all-encompassing ideology of the masculine envisages an image of mens beliefs and interests which is then seen as somehow intruding into the sacred realm of theoretical or institutional practices.60Criminology largely remains bifurcated around a man/woman axis in which general universal theories of crime causation have been taken to apply to men whilst the crimes of women are assessed from, or in relation to, the male norm.61Women have been seen as an aberration to this norm, to be as other, somehow less than fully male. However, crucially, one result of this simultaneous focus on a) the individual offender and b) the constitution of men as the norm has been that the sex-class of men have themselves been separated out into two groups the offending criminal man and the non-offending man. It has been feminist work, especially in the area of mens violences, which has challenged the subsequent pathologising of the crimes of men that results from such a division, by seeking to explore instead what men whitethorn share, as opposed to the attributes of the individual criminal man.62Within mainstream criminology men considered to be deviant or pathological have been contrasted with the normal and the law-abiding. Whilst some criminologists may have sought to blur this distinction, it is a bifurcation between different types or categories of men which nonetheless remains the norm of criminological discourse. It has been in seeking to understand this issue of what men may share that, in the work of the second phase criminologists writing from feminist and pro-feminist perspectives, the concept of masculinity has been seen to have had a particular, and rather different, heuristic purchase.63Despite the potential of the theory of a hegemonic masculinity to be an explanatory variable of crimes by men, there are conceptual limits to its appeal. Collier asserts that the concept of hegemonic masculinity is of limi ted use in seeking to engage with such a complex male subject.64What we are dealing with is really a description or a list of masculine traits, each conjuring up powerful images about men and crime. In theory, each of the characteristics associated with hegemonic masculinity could apply equally to women as to men. non all crime is to be explained by reference to hegemonic masculinity.65The concept of hegemonic masculinity has been used both as a primary and underlying cause of particular social effects and, simultaneously, as something which is seen as resulting from or which is accomplished through, recourse to crime.66Not only does this reflect a failure to resolve fully the tendency towards universalism, it can also be read as tautological.67Thus, it is alleged, what is actually being discussed in accounts of hegemonic masculinity and crime is, in effect, a range of popular ideologies of what constitute ideal or actual characteristics of being a man.Hegemonic masculinity does no t afford a handle on the conflicts generated between material and ideological networks of power. Nor, importantly, does it address the complexity and multi-layered nature of the social subject.68Thus it would appear that despite the breakthroughs promised by research into masculinities they have been seen to event some of the same problems associated with early feminism totalising discourse and essentialist claims. An adequate theory of masculinity which does not resort to totalising discourse and essentialist claims would be a refreshing addition to criminological discussions of gender.Feminist criminologists have long sought to highlight the manifest inadequacies of classical criminologys ignorance and distortion of women and crime. Smart has contended that the biological determinist position propounded by Lombroso and Ferrero has promulgated a misconception of the innate character and nature of women.69Attempts to rectify this distortion were made through the use of feminist em piricism and standpoint feminism which endeavoured to garner womens perspectives by turning to women themselves and seeking their own accounts of the criminal experience. However, these theories could not escape accusations of universalism and lack of constituency leveled by black feminists and postmodernists alike. Michel Foucaults theory of disciplinary power has been used by feminist criminologists to explain both the social conformity of women and the constitution of deviant womens identities in a social field consisting of multiple sites of power and knowledge. Feminist criminologists have used Foucaults analytics of power to show how the various strategies of oppression around the female body from ideological representations of femininity in classical criminology to concrete procedures of confinement and bodily control are central to the maintenance of hierarchical social relations. A relatively new development in criminological theory which concerns the issues of gender has been the idea of hegemonic masculinity. Connell has characterised hegemonic masculinity as a gender regime of sorts which is part of the organisational sexuality of institutions and society generally.70Hegemonic masculinity captures the ideology of masculinity pervading theoretical and established practices. The critique of hegemonic masculinity has focused on its tautological implications, and the contention that it is merely descriptive of masculine traits and cannot be used to engage with a complex male subject. Despite these criticisms, discourse on masculinity is a step forward for feminists who have long lobbied for adequate analysis of the role of gender in the criminological discipline.