This text explores the inability of the "crimino-legal complex" - criminology, criminal justice, criminal law, the media and ordinary, individual everyday experiences - to solve the problem of crime and criminality. It examines a number of events which have been taken to represent something definitive about crime. Each event is seen as representing the crisis within the crimino-legal tradition in different ways. Topics discussed include: criminology's resistance to feminist intervention; the ambiguities of victimization in relation to social justice in the city; conjugal homicide and illegal immigration; the pleasures of reading about crime in detective fiction; the discovery of the limits in the representation of crime when two children killed another child (the Bulger case); the governmental campaigns against single motherhood as a challenge to the heterosexual norm; and HIV/AIDS as spectacle in criminal justive policies.
Alison Young is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Criminology at Melbourne University. She is author of Femininity in Dissent (1990, Routledge) and has also written numerous articles on the intersections of law, criminology and feminist theory. Her current research concerns art as a mode of criminal and deviant expression.
Textual Outlaws and Criminal Conversations Criminology and the Question of Feminism The Universal Victim and the Body in Crisis The Scene of the Crime Reading the Justice of Detective Fiction The Bulger Case and the Trauma of the Visible Criminological Concordats On the Single Mother and the Criminal Child Fatal Frames HIV/AIDS as Spectacle in Criminal Justice Afterthoughts The Imagination of Crime
`Represents a significant contribution to the ongoing debate over the future of criminology.... Each chapter thus performs a critical cultural "reading" of specific examples from the crimino-legal complex. The examples chosen are disparate, varying from an intellectual/academic movement (feminism in/and criminology), to Conservative ministerial pronouncements on "the family", via the detective novel. The case studies offer a series of intelligent and thoughtful reflections on the various topics, teasing out meanings, explicating figures of speech and explaining the logics at work. In Chapter 2, she examines criminology from the perspective of feminism. She argues that criminology as a whole is intrinsically masculine, this conclusion deriving from her concern with the meanings embedded within criminological concepts. This emphasis on the gender bias of the categories of the criminological imagination is particularly interesting.... A distinctive feature of this book is the inclusion of certain psychoanalytic concepts into her argument.... an insightful and well-crafted work. Anyone concerned with the development of theoretical criminology would find it essential reading' - Theoretical Criminology `This bold and ambitious book.... Young offers interpretations that are challenging, provocative, and thought-provoking, and much of the book's impressiveness derives from this' - Journal of Law and Society `In short, this is an engaging study that offers valuable insights into the way crime is imagined. It can be an excellent addition to the graduate courses' syllabi in criminology, sociology, women's studies and cultural studies. I strongly recommend the book to scholars interested in issues related to the social construction of crime.... the book offers interesting insights into our understanding of the mechanisms used to create, discipline and domesticate textual outlaws' - American Journal of Sociology
