Jody Miller

YOUNG WOMEN AND GANG VIOLENCE: GENDER, STREET OFFENDING, AND VIOLENT VICTIMIZATION IN GANGS*

Drawing on multiple data sources in St. Louis, this article examines how gendered situational dynamics shape gang violence, including participation in violent offending and experiences of violent victimization. Combining an analysis of in-depth interviews with young women in St. Louis gangs with an examination of homicide reports from the same city, we find that young women, even regular offenders, highlight the significance of gender in shaping and limiting their involvement in serious violence. They use gender both to accomplish their criminal activities and to temper their involvement in gang crime. Consequently their risk for serious physical victimization in gangs is considerably less than young mens. St. Louis homicide data collaborate these qualitative findings. Not only are young women much less likely to be the victims of gang homicide, but the vast majority of female gang homicide victims were not the intended targets of the attack. In contrast, homicide reports suggest that the majority of male gang homicide victims were the intended targets. We suggest that gendered group processes and stratification within gangs are key factors explaining both violent offending and victimization risk in gangs.

The strengths and limits of 'doing gender' for understanding street crime

This paper is an engagement with Messerschmidt’s structured action theory, and more generally with feminist criminologists’ applications of the concept ‘doing gender’ for understanding street crime. Specifically, I investigate the ways in which the attribution of gender difference and the near exclusive emphasis on normative practices has limited our use of the doing gender model in theorizing gender and crime. I discuss several avenues for enhancing this approach, including the imperative to avoid tautology, and suggestions for challenging gender dualism, investigating the import of social hierarchies, and conceptualizing the complexities of agency and social practice.

Crack dealing, gender, and arrest avoidance

Drawing from interviews with female crack dealers, this paper explores the techniques they use to avoid arrest. We present these techniques through a four-part typology of contextual assimilation consisting of projected self-image, stashing, selling hours, and routine activities/staged performances. In addition to confronting many of the same risks and challenges as their male counterparts, women dealers face unique circumstances that are indisputably gendered. Our goal is to explore how gender shapes and mediates their dealing experience, paying specific attention to arrest-risk management. The datas larger conceptual implications are addressed, particularly as they relate to dynamic interchanges between gender and emergent street crack market conditions.

Violence and Coercion in Sri Lanka's Commercial Sex Industry: Intersections of Gender, Sexuality, Culture, and the Law

This study examines the local conditions facing commercial sex workers in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Based on findings from a 3-year field comparative field study, the author investigates the widespread nature of violence, coercion, and harassment against women and transgendered/gay men in an illicit sex market whose primary clientele are Sri Lankan men. Specifically, the author examines the relationship between cultural definitions of gender/sexuality and the implementation of existing legal frameworks and its impact on the treatment and experiences of sex workers. The author provides an overview of pathways into the sex industry as well as variations in the nature of coercion, violence, and abuse across industry sectors, focusing specifically on street-level versus “indoor” (i.e., brothels, lodges, massage clinics) sectors of the local sex industry.

Dramatic lives and relevant becomings: Toward a Deleuze- and Guattari-inspired cartography of young women's violent conflicts

The article explores how violence works to produce young women’s precarious positions in social milieus characterized by multiple marginalization. By paying attention to the micropolitics of violent engagements we argue that violent conflicts can be viewed as strategies for escaping positions of marginality into positions of relevance. The analysis builds on empirical data from Copenhagen, Denmark, gained through ethnographic fieldwork with the participation of 20 female informants aged 13–22. The theoretical contribution proposes viewing conflicts as multi-linear, multi-causal and non-chronological to account for the emotional tension and lived experience of violent conflicts. Finally we identify the need for further studies on how technosocial forms of communication play into violent conflicts among youth.

Women's "storylines" of methamphetamine initiation in the Midwest

Scholars have learned a great deal about the age at which individuals typically initiate particular drugs, the contexts in which they initiate use, and some of the motivations for initiation. Despite this attention, there remain few scholarly examinations of the accounts or “storylines” that users themselves give as explanation for their initiation. The authors present research from 40 interviews with female methamphetamine (meth) users incarcerated in Missouri, a state that has gained national attention for having high numbers of meth lab seizures. This study focuses specifically on the ways in which women articulate their storylines of initiation into meth use. These reveal a number of important findings, including the most common contexts in which women describe first using meth and their motivations for doing so. In particular, the findings highlight the role of family drug use, prior victimization experiences, and meth’s known pharmacological effects in women’s motivations for initiation.

Violence Against Urban African American Girls: Challenges for Feminist Advocacy

The pioneering efforts of second wave feminists problematized the issue of violence against women. In the intervening decades, a diverse group of stakeholders have claimed the problem as their own. Here I discuss the challenges that result from the evolution of academic, policy, and governmental expertise on violence against women, including the tendency to narrowly frame this problem through the lenses of public health and criminal justice, thus decoupling it from broader issues of equity and justice. Drawing from my research on violence against African American girls in distressed urban neighborhoods, I argue for feminist advocacy as an overarching goal in the study of gendered violence. This orientation holds much promise for (a) recognizing the expertise of women in identifying and articulating their struggles, challenges, and life worlds; (b) grounding our research in structural, institutional, and situationally relevant contexts; and (c) infusing our work with a commitment to social justice.

TRANSITORY MOBILITY, CULTURAL HETEROGENEITY, AND VICTIMIZATION RISK AMONG YOUNG MEN OF COLOR: INSIGHTS FROM AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY IN CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA

The coupling of racial and economic stratification has been found to result in a range of adverse outcomes for youth of color, including disproportionate exposure to violence and victimization. Primary explanations of these patterns, particularly at the micro-level, have focused on the impact of street culture. In this article, we draw from a multiyear ethnography in Cape Town, South Africa, to offer a theoretical elaboration of the place of culture in contributing to victimization risks among urban minority young men. The study is based on data collected from a sample of 26 young men of color who lived on the Cape Flats between 2003 and 2006. Using grounded theory methods, we suggest the import of unequal access to spatial mobility as a multifaceted means by which culture mediates young mens risks for victimization in disadvantaged communities. We find that transitory mobility--conceptualized as youths temporary access to cultural spaces outside their segregated residential neighborhoods--is an important source of cultural heterogeneity in townships that can intensify the strength of local social identities and outgroup antipathies directed at those whose mobility is perceived as a cultural threat. Transitorily mobile young mens cultural repertoires are a key facet of street efficacy that can either insulate them from risk or heighten their vulnerabilities. Our findings are suggestive of important sources of variation in young mens victimization outcomes in disadvantaged communities, offering insights about factors that shape risks beyond those linked to the victim-offender overlap in high-risk settings. Language: en

Beyond 'Doing Gender': Incorporating Race, Class, Place, and Life Transitions into Feminist Drug Research

This essay draws from our research with US rural women methamphetamine users in 2009 to offer strategies for “revisioning” the drug use(r) field to better understand the impact of gender on drug use and drug market participation. We highlight the insights and limitations of a popular strategy in feminist research that conceptualizes gender as performance— commonly referred to as “doing gender”—using illustrations from our research. We encourage scholars to move beyond a primarily normative orientation in studying gender, and investigate gendered organizational features of social life including their intersections with other aspects of social inequality such as those of race, class, and place. In addition, we suggest that feminist scholars can integrate gender in a rigorous way into theoretical perspectives that are typically inattentive to its import, as a means of challenging, enriching, and refining research on drug use, drug users, and drug market participation.

Gendered Carceral Regimes in Sri Lanka: Colonial Laws, Postcolonial Practices, and the Social Control of Sex Workers

Across time and place, semicarceral institutions extend the arms of the state to control women’s perceived moral and sexual transgressions. In this article, we examine the case of Sri Lanka, where the criminalization of women who participate in transactional sex is a prominent feature of gendered social control. We trace how vestiges of British colonial law intersect with Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, militarization, and the gendered liberalization of Sri Lanka’s economy to heighten national anxieties about women’s sexuality and sexual practices, culminating in penal excesses directed at those engaged in commercial sex. Yet processes of carceral control are never seamless: we also trace their unevenness in practice, investigating what they reveal about tensions between Sinhala Buddhist ideals of respectable womanhood, reformation, and the realities of marginalized women’s lives in contemporary Sri Lanka.