Masculinities And Crime

Challenging the common masculinist character of criminological research, James W. Messerschmidt develops an elaborate scrutiny of the gender roles that, along with class and race, influence the occurrence and types of crimes in our society.

This work looks at whether crime is a masculine phenomenon, and why crime is so overwhelmingly an activity conducted by men. The author explores a series of high-profile events and debates around crime, criminal justice and social (dis)order.

James W. Messerschmidt’s Masculinities and Crime quickly became a classic text for social scientists examining the relationship between masculinities and crime. The book is completely revised and unique in its focus on Messerschmidt’s most important research and theorizing accomplished over the last twenty-five years, as well as for its emphasis on selected studies by other scholars that represent the diversity of contemporary research on masculinities and crime. This anniversary edition brings together a combination of the “old” and the “new” to examine what insight each have to offer scholars in terms of knowledge about the social construction of masculinities and crime.

This volume features the leading contemporary articles that are part of, or related to, the 'new masculinities' approach in this sphere. These comprise an impressive range of theoretical and empirical work including important cultural and ethnographic analyses. They emphasise the relationship between masculinities, the causes and patterns of most criminal offending and victimisation and the broader workings of the wider criminal justice system of policing (public and private), criminal courts, corrections and prisons. All of the material has been selected from flagship international journals and was produced by a global mix of male and female researchers with diverse disciplinary backgrounds. These scholars share the view that masculinities are plural, socially constructed, reproduced in the collective social practices of different men and embedded in institutional and occupational settings. Furthermore, masculinities are intricately linked with social struggles for power that occur between men and women and different men. Crime, criminal justice and their cultural representation are key terrain for these masculine contests and are always overlain with issues such as social class, age, race/ethnicity and sexuality.

The book argues that capitalism, as an economic system, and patriarchy, as a form of gender organization, must be treated as interacting structures in any attempt to explain crime. It begins with a socialist feminist critique of the failure of Marxist criminology to analyze gender relations and the origin of female oppression accurately and, therefore, how these factors contribute to the development of crime in society. It then explores such topics as the limitations of both liberal and radical feminist viewpoints concerning crime, the causative factors for a variety of crimes, ranging from street crime to corporate crime, and the inadequacies of government's present conservative approach to crime.

The editors, Rosemary Gartner and Bill McCarthy, have assembled a diverse cast of criminologists, historians, legal scholars, psychologists, and sociologists from a number of countries to discuss key concepts and debates central to the field. The Handbook includes examinations of the historical and contemporary patterns of women's and men's involvement in crime; as well as biological, psychological, and social science perspectives on gender, sex, and criminal activity. Several essays discuss the ways in which sex and gender influence legal and popular reactions to crime. An important theme throughout The Handbook is the intersection of sex and gender with ethnicity, class, age, peer groups, and community as influences on crime and justice. Individual chapters investigate both conventional topics - such as domestic abuse and sexual violence - and topics that have only recently drawn the attention of scholars - such as human trafficking, honor killing, gender violence during war, state rape, and genocide.

What is it about crime that makes it `men's work'? Can we imagine masculinity without crime? This is the first book of its kind to bring contributors from three continents together to examine the relationship between masculinity and crime. Covering such areas as policing, prisons, violence against women, homicide, white-collar crime, and male victimisation, this book will force us to rethink many aspects of masculinity and crime.

James W. Messerschmidt’s groundbreaking book Crime as Structured Action demonstrates that to understand crime, we must understand how crime operates through a complex series of gender, race, sexual, and class practices. In the second edition of this powerful book, Messerschmidt updates both structured action theory as well as several of the original case studies, and he includes a new case study that further brings structured action theory to life. The book also features expanded discussions of whiteness and sexuality, and their relationships to crime.