Young and unafraid: queer criminology’s unbounded potential

Abstract

Queer criminology, a fairly young subfield, deals with matters of import for sexual and gender minorities, particularly LGBTQ+ populations. Areas of interest include reducing invisibility and inequity, though these pursuits can sometimes be accompanied with potential pitfalls or unintended consequences. This article provides an overview of the goals and considerations of queer criminology, while focusing on how to cultivate queer criminology's unbounded potential to help address pressing social problems. Several global issues of immediate concern for LGBTQ+ people are identified, such as criminalization and devaluation of their lives, which has resulted in their detainment and torture, persecution when they organize for their rights, overrepresentation in criminal justice settings, and even fatal violence. Included alongside these issues are strategies to produce meaningful work during what seems to be a time of imminent crisis. The author provides strong encouragement to fiercely pursue projects that can improve our understanding, and, ultimately, the lives of LGBTQ+ people.

The carceral production of transgender poverty: How racialized gender policing deprives transgender women of housing and safety

“…Queer criminologists have criticized mainstream criminology as "a heteronormative, Anglocentric project where sexuality and gender binaries are taken for granted" and queer and trans experiences are treated as irrelevant to understanding power relations (Lamble et al, 2020: 5; see also Ball, 2016). Consistent with queer (Buist and Lenning, 2015;Buist and Stone, 2013;Panfil, 2018;Woods, 2014) and intersectional (Crenshaw;1991;Potter, 2015;Ritchie, 2017) approaches, this article begins with transgender women's experiences with policing to analyze structural causes of racialized and gendered poverty. This article demonstrates how scholarly understanding of criminalization and poverty governance could be improved through a queer and intersectional analysis that goes beyond documenting disparate impacts of policing to focus instead on the institutional production of inequality.…”

Looking to Critical Criminology to Centre Gender and Violence Against Women in State Crime Studies

“…The marginalisation and harms committed by state against LGBTQ+ people, are not new to critical criminologists. In fact, the recent development of queer criminology recognises and draws attention to the invisibility of issues specific to a person's sex and gender with a particular focus on LGBTQ+ populations, including their devaluation, persecution, and violation of their rights (Panfil 2018). Many of these works acknowledge the state, their apparatus of control, and actors as being instrumental to the harms being committed; however, there are few critical works that explicitly frame the state as a criminal actor.…”

Queer utopias and queer criminology

“…In a set of studies, queer criminologists have attempted to examine the ontological anchorage of queer criminology (Ball, 2014; Dwyer et al, 2016; Panfil, 2018). For Matthew Ball (2016), the ontological crux of queer criminology brings insights from queer and LGBTQI studies to criminology in order to better recognise the limitations of established criminological thought.…”

“…Thus, while Vanessa Panfil (2018) identifies queer criminology’s ‘unbounded potential’ in its capacity to address pressing global social problems often ignored by criminology at large, essentially, ‘crime’ remains at the core of queer criminology (pp. 1–2).…”