Matthew Ball

What’s Queer About Queer Criminology?

The term “queer criminology” is increasingly being used in criminological discussions, though there remains little consistency with regard to how it is used and to what it refers. It has been used broadly to describe criminological research on LGBTQ people and their interactions with the justice system, more specifically to describe those analyses that identify and critique the heteronormative knowledges or binarized understandings of gender and sexuality within criminal justice research, and also to label theoretical and conceptual pieces that argue for a greater connection between queer theory and criminology. However, there are some important distinctions between “queer criminology” and “queer theory” more widely, particularly the deconstructive approaches of the latter. This chapter explores the engagements between queer theory and “queer criminology,” specifically focusing on whether “queer criminology” adopts an understanding of “queer” as an attitude, and as signifying a deconstructive project—a position that features in many strands of queer theoretical work. It will argue that while there are different ways of engaging with “queer” as a concept, and that each of these engagements produces different kinds of “queer” projects, “queer criminology” does not always engage with the deconstructive approaches drawn from queer theory. Ultimately, this can limit the ways that “queer criminologists” are able to address injustice.

Heteronormativity, homonormativity, and violence

The existence of intimate partner violence within non-heterosexual and/ or non-cisgendered relationships1 is gaining greater recognition. There are a handful of community organisations that offer services and assistance to victims and perpetrators of this violence (particularly gay men and lesbians), and the body of research literature in this area is slowly growing. While some critiques warn of the dangers of applying the theoretical and conceptual tools developed to understand relationship violence among heterosexuals directly to queer relationships, the inclusion of queer relationships in these discourses has for the most part been celebrated as a positive step forward, addressing the historical invisibility of sexual minorities in these areas. Nevertheless, the debate about how best to understand and represent the experience of violence in these communities continues, with the focus being to determine whether it is better to expand the tools used to understand heterosexual intimate partner violence to include queer communities, or whether new tools are necessary in order to understand their experiences.

The 'Prison of Love' and its queer discontents: On the value of paranoid and reparative readings in queer criminological scholarship

During the San Francisco Pride celebrations of 2014, the world’s largest fetish pornography website, Kink.com, hosted a prison-themed party.1 Attendees were encouraged to dress up as prison guards, prisoners, and police, while the venue, The Armoury (a fortress-like building in San Francisco, which is Kink.com’s headquarters and, as the name suggests, an old National Guard armoury), was decorated as a prison space. Promotional material for the event invited people to ‘[b]ring a cellmate [and] share the love’ with hot inmates, prison guards, and assorted muscle boys, among others (WE Party 2014).

Sexuality in a criminal justice curriculum: a study of student conceptualisations of gay identity

Abstract Heteronormative discourses provide the most common lens through which sexuality is understood within university curricula. This means that sexuality is discussed in terms of categories of identity, with heterosexuality accorded primacy while all ‘others’ are indeed ‘othered’. This article draws on research carried out by the authors in a core first year university ethics class, in which a fictional text was introduced with the intention of unpacking these discourses. An ethnographic study was undertaken where both students and teachers engaged in discussions over, and personal written reflections on, the textual content. In reporting the results of that study this article uses a post-structural framework to identify how classroom and textual discourses might be used to break down socially constructed categories of sexuality and students’ conceptualisations of non-heterosexual behaviour. It was found that engaging in discussion in the context of the fictional text allowed some students to begin to recognise their own heteronormative views and engage in an informed critique of them.

Policing LGBTIQ people in rural spaces: emerging issues and future concerns

This article argues identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer and/or questioning (LGBTIQ) in rural spaces can produce specific types of policing experiences. While some literature examines the experiences of LGBTIQ people with police, very little has focused on how rurality explicitly shapes these experiences. This is significant considering research highlights how rurality can be connected to pronounced experiences of homophobia and trans-phobia. The article highlights examples from three research projects that explored: LGBTIQ young peoples interactions with police; LGBTI peoples interactions with police liaison services; and LGBTIQ-identifying police officers. The examples demonstrate the need for further research to examine how policing “happens” with rural LGBTIQ people to ensure more accountable policing policies and practice, and to highlight the complexities of localized, rural policing contexts that can both support and marginalize LGBTIQ people.

Queer criminology and the global south: Setting queer and southern criminologies into dialogue

The growth of ‘Queer Criminology’ in recent years has seen greater attention being paid to the treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people by criminal justice agents and institutions. While this work has developed across both the global North (the UK and the USA) and South (Australia), its epistemological, conceptual, and political foundations remain firmly situated in the global North. The more recent emergence of Southern criminology, then, offers important tools with which to reflect on the extent to which Queer criminology mirrors the epistemological and political concerns of the global North, and the implications of this for those in the global South. This chapter begins the task of drawing together these two fields. It first uses critiques drawn from the global South to examine the ways that Queer criminology reflects ‘Northern’ LGBT and Queer frameworks. It then explores the implications of transposing initiatives that may provide positive outcomes for LGBTQ people in the global North, such as community policing, into the global South without fully accounting for key differences in these contexts.

Intimate-partner violence within the Queensland transgender community: Barriers to accessing services and seeking help

Intimate-partner violence, also known as domestic violence, can be defined as ‘any pattern of behaviour within an intimate relationship used to coerce, dominate or isolate; the exertion of any form of power that maintains control’ (Dolan-Soto 2001: 1). To date, much of the research that has explored this issue has focused on cisgender, heterosexual women’s experiences of intimate-partner violence, with the effect that these experiences have shaped our understandings of this violence and much of the social policy implemented to address it (Ball & Hayes 2010: 163). This can mean that, at times, the experiences of others are overlooked. Two such overlooked groups include gay and lesbian victims and perpetrators, and transgender victims and perpetrators.1 While in recent years, criminological research has developed more interest in the experiences of gay and lesbian victims of intimate-partner violence, it has paid limited attention to the issue of transgender intimate-partner violence (Bornstein et al. 2006; Pitts et al. 2006; Leonard et al. 2008).

Evangelism, Faith, and Forgetting

This chapter explores three interrelated problems to be considered in any attempts to develop queer criminology—the problems of evangelism, faith, and forgetting. It engages with Pat Carlen’s warning against evangelism in academic criminology, and encourages queer criminologists to take this warning seriously in order to ensure that they offer an original contribution to criminology. It also considers the interrelated problems of faith and forgetting that queer criminologists may encounter, such as faith in the criminal justice system or in ‘queer’ as an identity category, and a forgetting of the injuries produced by the criminal justice system and the slipperiness of ‘queer’. It concludes by suggesting that a cautiously reparative reading, in line with the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, can help respond to these problems.

Queer/ing Criminology

This chapter explores the current state of debate about queer criminology. It outlines and critically examines those works that have argued for the development of a queer/ed criminology and suggested how this can be achieved. This overview serves to establish the originality of the intersections between queer scholarship and criminology suggested here.

Deconstruction and Queering in Criminology

This chapter explores deconstruction within criminology, in order to more fully develop within criminology the more deconstructive and disruptive aspects of queer scholarship. It considers the diversity of existing approaches to deconstruction within criminology, and outlines what queer deconstructive approaches entail. It then discusses some of the limitations of deconstruction within criminology, and argues for a shift towards the activity of critique (understood as a project of opening up possibilities and pushing against limits), which is more in line with queer work, as opposed to criticism (understood as an activity that is premised on judgement), which underpins much existing scholarship.