For guidance on citations see FAQs.

Drawing on the concept of utopia to reflect upon the emerging field of queer criminology and José Esteban Muñoz’s account of queer theory as essentially utopian, we draw two conclusions. First, we suggest that queer criminology is currently limited by tinkering at the edges with piecemeal reforms instead of focussing on radical, wholesale changes, and second, that queer theory contains within it the potential for a more holistic reimagining of the social world. In doing so, we question rigid cis/trans binaries and reject accounts of trans/gender that ignore the role of structural harm. We draw on Ernst Bloch’s concepts of ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ utopia to suggest that while queer criminology has succeeded in producing largely ‘abstract’ utopias, it struggles in translating these into ‘concrete’ ones. By introducing examples of trans literary utopias as potential transformative cultural forms, however, we consider the potential of queer theory for realising ‘concrete’ utopia through a more radical rethinking of the social world.

INTRODUCTIONThis chapter identifies the commitment to the development of practical projects concerned with improving or reforming society by eradicating (or at least reducing) crime as a key theme running throughout the history of criminology. This is despite the sometimes formal claims amongst criminologists to value-neutrality and the objective social 'scientific' nature of the discipline. At the heart of criminology, it is argued, lies an implicit vision of 'the good society'. However, within a contemporary climate at best discouraging radical reimaginings of the social order and, at worst, warning of their inherent dangerousness, such visions have typically been repressed. The result has been an emphasis on 'tinkering at the edges' or 'piecemeal reforms', which leave underlying broader structural inequalities in which issues of crime and justice are located, intact. Despite increasing calls (from both social scientists in general, and criminologists in particular) for the development of an 'emancipatory social science ' (Wright, 2007; and 'a better politics of crime and its control… under which a more hopeful and more richly democratic way of approaching questions of crime and justice might be developed ' (Loader and Sparks 2012, p. 14), there has, as yet, been little guidance as to how such improved social sciences are to be realised. It is in response to this absence that the development of a 'utopian method' as proposed by Ruth Levitas (2005;2007a; is advanced as a means of developing an explicitly normative and speculative form of criminology. It is argued that, via the three aspects to this method identified by Levitas (archaeology, architecture and ontology), the implicit visions of the good society inhering in different criminological theories can not only be rendered explicit, but, crucially, can be subjected to normative evaluation. Moreover, in so doing, it is anticipated, a genuinely 'utopian criminology' can be realised.

No abstract

No abstract