Doing Crime Prevention, Doing Gender: Canadian Women’s Responses to Police-Produced Gendered Crime-Prevention Messaging

The field of critical heterosexualities studies invites sociologists to untether heterosexuality from biology. In this article, I leverage the findings of 113 interviews with a racially diverse sample of cis and trans women to examine how women maintain everyday dignity in the street despite widespread gender harassment and systemic, racialized sexual inequalities. Drawing on social constructionist theory and applying an intersectional framework, I examine heterosexuality as a performance, uncovering how gender identity, race, and sexual orientation intersect to shape both the costs and benefits of “doing heterosexuality” in the street. Through practices such as wearing wedding rings, holding the hands of men friends, and displaying affection for men in public places, straight, queer, cis, and trans women creatively resist heteronormativity’s regulation of their social-sexual lives and strive to enunciate sexual unavailability; communicate the existence of a protector; and signal respectability by demonstrating conformity with racialized, cisnormative ideals of gender and sexual normativity. Findings demonstrate that racialized, queer, and trans participants tend to experience greater emotional costs and fewer symbolic rewards associated with “doing heterosexuality” than white, straight-identified, and cis participants. This intersectional analysis enriches extant research on gender and sexuality, illuminating the utility of the “doing heterosexuality” framework for uncovering intersections between heterosexual accountability and gender inequality across diverse organizational and interpersonal contexts.

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Beyond Fear of Crime: Toward a Reconceptualization of Emotional Responses to Threat in Urban Public Places

Lennox

2024

Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World

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What do social scientists communicate when they label a person or community fearful of crime? I examine the utility of “fear of crime” as a heuristic for representing emotional responses to threat. Applying Sklansky’s concept of cognitive burn-in, which describes the epistemic foreclosures that occur when schemas become entrenched, I argue that the use of “fear of crime” across domains including academic research and public policy ossifies a simplified framework for thinking about risk. This framework overstates the extent to which the public’s negative emotions in the street are directly crime related and conceals intersectional quality-of-life inequalities. Based on interview data, I theorize three emotional responses to threat: reactive fear, anticipatory fear, and anticipatory anxiety. These responses are socially stratified, with marginalized women disproportionately vulnerable to severe emotions. This typology disaggregates actual and prospective harms, distinguishes crime threats from social threats, and reveals the stratification of emotion and threat severity.

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Doing Crime Prevention, Doing Gender: Canadian Women’s Responses to Police-Produced Gendered Crime-Prevention Messaging

Cited by 3 publications

References 34 publications

The Feminization of Criminal Justice

The Feminization of Criminal Justice

“The Only Self-Defense I Have is My Wedding Band”: Doing Heterosexuality, Evading Gender Harassment, and Becoming Respectable in the Street

Beyond Fear of Crime: Toward a Reconceptualization of Emotional Responses to Threat in Urban Public Places

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