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Crit Crim (2013) 21:287304
DOI 10.1007/s10612-013-9187-2
Meda Chesney-Lind Merry Morash
Published online: 11 May 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
Abstract This essay makes the case for a transformative critical feminist criminology, one that explicitly theorizes gender, one that requires a commitment to social justice, and one that must increasingly be global in scope. Key to this re-thinking of a mature eld is the need to expand beyond traditional positivist notions of science, to embrace core elements of a feminist approach to methodology, notably the epistemological insights gleaned from a new way of thinking about research, methods, and the relationship between the knower and the known. Other key features of contemporary feminist criminology include an explicit commitment to intersectionality, an understanding of the unique positionality of women in the male dominated elds of policing and corrections, a focus on masculinity and the gender gap in serious crime, a critical assessment of corporate media and the demonization of girls and women of color, and a recognition of the importance of girls studies as well as womens studies to the development of a global, critical feminist criminology.
Introduction
Early theories to explain delinquency, crime, and victimization were actually limited to theorizing male deviance, male criminality, and male victimization with a specic focus of showcasing the utility of the positivist paradigm to the study of the distributions and causes of these phenomena. Thus, the founders of criminology almost completely overlooked womens crime, and they ignored, minimized, and trivialized female victimization (Hughes 2005). When they did consider women, they considered them in relation to men, and discussions of these relations rarely if ever included details of the horric violence that many women suffered at the hands of those men (or blamed the woman for the assaults).
M. Chesney-Lind (&)
Department of Womens Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA e-mail: [email protected]
M. Morash
School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
Transformative Feminist Criminology: A Critical Re-thinking of a Discipline
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288 M. Chesney-Lind, M. Morash
Based on the assumption that aspects of the social world could be precisely measured and clearly demonstrably linked as causes and effects, positivist methodology came to dominate criminology by the mid-twentieth century (see Deegan 1990). This perspective...