Jordan Blair Woods

“Queering Criminology”: Overview of the State of the Field

This chapter provides an overview of the treatment of sexual orientation and gender identity issues and LGBTQ populations in the field of criminology. The chapter advances three main points. First, it argues that there is very little data on LGBTQ people’s experiences of crime, both in terms of victimization and offending. Second, the overwhelming majority of criminological engagement with sexual orientation and gender identity occurred prior to the 1980s, and discussed these concepts insofar as assessing whether “homosexuality”—a term that was often employed to describe non-heterosexual sexualities and gender non-conforming identities/expressions—was or was not a form of criminal sexual deviance. Third, to date, there is little to no theoretical engagement with sexual orientation and gender identity in each of the four major schools of criminological thought: biological, psychological, sociological, and critical. I argue that these three points are a reflection of the historical and continuing stigma of the sexual deviance framework on the treatment of sexual orientation and gender identity concepts, and LGBTQ people in the field. This chapter makes a call to “queer criminology,” which in my view, requires overcoming the sexual deviance framework and reorienting criminological inquiry to give due consideration to sexual orientation and gender identity as non-deviant differences that may shape people’s experiences of crime and experiences in the criminal justice system more generally.

The birth of modern criminology and gendered constructions of homosexual criminal identity.

There is a dearth of engagement with LGBTQ populations, and sexual orientation and gender identity more broadly, in the field of criminology. This article analyzes the treatment of sexual orientation and gender identity at the birth of the discipline around the 1870s. Through an analysis of Cesare Lombroso’s writings, the article argues that a multifaceted stigma of deviance attached to homosexuality and gender nonconformity in early criminological theory. The article explains this multifaceted stigma in terms of broader political, social, cultural, and legal developments before and during the late nineteenth century that shaped modern Western conceptions of sexual orientation and gender identity.

LGBT Identity and Crime

Recent studies report that LGBT adults and youth disproportionately face hardships that scholars have long-viewed as risk factors for criminal offending and victimization. Some of these factors include higher rates of poverty, overrepresentation in the youth homeless population, and overrepresentation in the foster care system. In spite of these risk factors, there is a lack of study and available data on LGBT people who come into contact with the criminal justice system as offenders or as victims.Through an original intellectual history of the treatment of LGBT identity and crime, this Article provides insight into how this problem in LGBT criminal justice developed and examines directions to move beyond it. The history shows that until the mid-1970s, the criminalization of homosexuality left little room to think of LGBT people in the criminal justice system other than as deviant sexual offenders. The trend to decriminalize sodomy in the mid-1970s opened a narrow space for scholars, advocates, and policymakers to use anti-discrimination principles to redefine LGBT people in the criminal justice system as innocent and non-deviant hate crime victims, as opposed to deviant sexual offenders. Although this paradigm shift has contributed to some important gains for LGBT people, this Article argues that it cannot be celebrated as an unequivocal triumph. This shift has left us with flat understandings of LGBT offenders as sexual offenders and flat understandings of LGBT victims as hate crime victims. These one-dimensional narratives miss many criminal justice problems that especially fall on LGBT people who bear the brunt of inequality in the criminal justice system — including LGBT people of color, transgender people, undocumented LGBT people, and low-income and homeless LGBT people. The Article concludes by showing how ideas and methods in criminology offer promise to enhance accounts of LGBT offending and LGBT victimization, and in turn, inform law, policy, and the design of criminal justice institutions to better respond to the needs and experiences of LGBT offenders and LGBT victims.