This month, we include both an essay by Lizzie Seal on works of feminist criminology that she has found influential, as well as a list of forthcoming books on gender and crime.  Enjoy!

FORTHCOMING WORKS ON GENDER AND CRIME

Title: Violence Against Latina Immigrants Citizenship, Inequality, and Community
Author: Roberta Villalón

Publisher: New York University Press

Release Date: 6/07/2010
212 pages

Book description (from the publisher):

Caught between violent partners and the bureaucratic complications of the US Immigration system, many immigrant women are particularly vulnerable to abuse. For two years, Roberta Villalón volunteered at a nonprofit group that offers free legal services to mostly undocumented immigrants who had been victims of abuse. Her innovative study of Latina survivors of domestic violence explores the complexities at the intersection of immigration, citizenship, and violence, and shows how inequality is perpetuated even through the well-intentioned delivery of vital services. Through archival research, participant observation, and personal interviews, Violence Against Latina Immigrants provides insight into the many obstacles faced by battered immigrant women of color, bringing their stories and voices to the fore. Ultimately, Villalón proposes an active policy advocacy agenda and suggests possible changes to gender violence-based immigration laws, revealing the complexities of the lives of Latina immigrants as they confront issues of citizenship, gender violence, and social inequalities.

Short description:

Examining the intersections of immigration, citizenship, and domestic violence, Villalón brings light to the obstacles that undocumented battered women face. Archival research, participant observation at a non-profit organization offering services to abuse victims, and personal interviews are used to reveal the complexities these abuse survivors face in the United States.

Website: http://www.nyupress.org/product_info.php?products_id=11277

Title: Legacies of Crime: A Follow-Up of the Children of Highly Delinquent Girls and Boys

Author: Peggy C. Giordano

Publisher: Cambridge University Press (part of the Cambridge Studies in Criminology)

Release date: February 2010

266 pages

Book description (from the publisher):

Legacies of Crime explores the lives of seriously delinquent girls and boys who were followed over a twenty-year period as they navigated the transition to adulthood. In-depth interviews with these women and men and their children – a majority now adolescents themselves – depict the adults’ economic and social disadvantages and continued criminal involvement, and in turn the unique vulnerabilities of their children. Giordano identifies family dynamics that foster the intergenerational transmission of crime, violence, and drug abuse, rejecting the notion that such continuities are based solely on genetic similarities or even lax, inconsistent parenting. The author breaks new ground in directly exploring – and in the process revising – the basic tenets of classic social learning theories, and confronting the complications associated with the parent’s gender. Legacies of Crime also identifies factors associated with resilience in the face of what is often a formidable package of risks favoring intergenerational continuity.

Short description: This book details the lives of seriously delinquent boys and girls, followed over twenty years, as they transition into adulthood. Using interviews with these men and women, as well as their children (many of whom are adolescents), Giordano examines the way in which family dynamics contribute to intergenerational transmission of crime, violence and drug use.

Website: http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521705516

Title: A Woman Doing Life: Notes from a Prison for Women

Author: Erin George

Edited by Robert Johnson
Afterword by Joycelyn Pollock

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Release date: December 2009

208 pages

Book description (from the publisher):

A Woman Doing Life is the only book that tells stories of women in prison from the inside out. Author and inmate Erin George draws a vivid and uniquely raw portrait of female life in prison, detailing her own responses to incarceration as well as her observations of prison relationships, death and sickness, reactions from friends and family, and even “cooking” in prison. The text also features poignant stories from other female inmates.

Website: http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Sociology/CriminalJustice/?view=usa&ci=9780199734757

Title: Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas

Editors: Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano

Publisher: Duke University Press

Release date: 2010

408 pages

Book description (from the publisher):

More than 600 women and girls have been murdered and more than 1,000 disappeared in the Mexican state of Chihuahua since 1993. Violence against women has increased throughout Mexico and in other countries including Argentina, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Peru. Law enforcement officials have often failed or refused to undertake investigations and prosecutions, creating a climate of impunity for perpetrators and denying survivors of violence and victims’ relatives truth and justice. Terrorizing Women is an impassioned yet rigorously analytical response to the escalation in violence against women in Latin America during the past two decades. It is part of a feminist effort to categorize violence rooted in gendered power structures as violations of human rights. The analytical framework of “feminicide” is crucial to that effort, as the editors explain in their introduction. They define feminicide as gender-based violence that implicates both the state (directly or indirectly) and individual perpetrators. It is structural violence rooted in social, political, economic, and cultural inequalities.

Terrorizing Women brings together essays by feminist and human rights activists, attorneys, and scholars from Latin America and the United States, as well as testimonios by relatives of women who were disappeared or murdered. In addition to investigating egregious violations of women’s human rights, the contributors consider feminicide in relation to neoliberal economic policies, the violent legacies of military regimes, and the sexual fetishization of women’s bodies. They suggest strategies for confronting feminicide; propose legal, political, and social routes for redressing injustices; and track alternative remedies generated by the communities affected by gender-based violence. In a photo essay portraying the justice movement in Chihuahua, relatives of disappeared and murdered women bear witness to feminicide and demand accountability.

Short description:

This is a collection of essays by feminist and human rights activists, scholars, and lawyers from the United States and Latin America focused on the increasing violence against women in Latin America and, in particular, the disappearance and murder of so many women and children in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Framing this violence in the context of human rights violations, these chapters draw attention to the phenomenon the editors call “femininicide” and suggest strategies – legal, political, and social – to address this violence.

Website: http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=18422&viewby=reading%20list&categoryid=22&sort=newest

Title: Youth Violence: Sex and Race Differences in Offending, Victimization, and Gang Membership

Authors: Finn-Aage Esbensen, Dana Peterson, Terrance J. Taylor and Adrienne Freng

Publisher: Temple University Press

Book release: (approximately) August 2010

240 pages

Book description (from the publisher):

Violence by and against youth continues to be one of the most challenging subjects facing criminologists. In this comprehensive and integrated analysis of the interrelationships of youth violence, violent victimization, and gang membership, Finn-Aage Esbensen, Dana Peterson, Terrance J. Taylor and Adrienne Freng seek to understand what causes youth violence and what can be done about it. Using the results from an inclusive study they conducted of eighth-graders in eleven American cities, the authors examine how the nature, etiology, and intersections of youth violence are structured by both sex and race/ethnicity.

Website: http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/2046_reg.html

 

FEMINIST CRIMINOLOGY INFLUENCES – LIZZIE SEAL

There are of course many texts that have influenced my approach to feminist research and writing, but I would like to acknowledge a couple of books that had a formative influence on the my forthcoming book, Women, Murder and Femininity: Gender Representations of Women Who Kill. These are not necessarily the ones that I cite the most, but rather helped to inform the way that I see representations of gender in cases of women accused of murder. I teach criminology in a British university, but my work is interdisciplinary, drawing on aspects of criminology and cultural history. The empirical work that I undertook for the book was an in depth analysis of case files held in the British National Archives of mid twentieth-century women accused of murder. In order to identify the representations of femininity that these bureaucratic sources produced, I used techniques drawn from discourse analysis. I also viewed the cases as cultural artefacts, which in addition to revealing different portrayals of femininity also highlight key moments of social and cultural change. Two books that have long been influences are:

Worrall, A. 1990. Offending Women: Female Lawbreakers and the Criminal Justice System. London: Routledge.

Worrall examines how female defendants in the criminal justice system are constructed through discourses of pathology, sexuality and domesticity.  She identifies these as the dominant discourses of femininity, which regulate ‘appropriate’ female behaviour. She argues that they have relevance  not only to the social control of women who appear before the courts, but also women more generally. Worrall’s focus on the significance of the role of ‘appropriate femininity’ has been utilised by Nicolson (1995) in his analysis of legal responses to women who kill abusive male partners and Ballinger (2000) in her study of the fifteen women to be executed in twentieth-century England and Wales. My own book on women who kill explores five recurrent discourses of femininity that appear in cases of women accused of murder.

Jones, A. 1996. Women Who Kill. Boston: Beacon Press.

Jones’ book was the first feminist study about women who kill that I read and, as it was originally published in 1980, one of the first to be written. She is not a criminologist but her adoption of a feminist framework in order to examine how women who kill have been portrayed throughout American history chimes with the aims of feminist criminologists who are concerned with representations of womanhood. As well as analysing an array of cases from colonial times until the late twentieth-century, Jones makes two crucial points. The first is that the story of women who kill is also the story of women more generally, as reactions to women on what she describes as ‘the raveling edge’ can tell us much about attitudes towards women in a given period, and also about their lived experiences. The second is that heightened social and cultural tensions towards women who kill frequently appear at times when the progression of women is a source of anxiety. Jones’ radical feminist framework is not my own, but her belief in the historical significance of cases of women who kill was a formative influence.

Ballinger, A. 2000. Dead Woman Walking. Aldershot: Ashgate

Nicolson, D. 1995. “Telling Tales: Gender Discrimination, Gender Construction and Battered Women Who Kill,” Feminist Legal Studies, 3 (2): 185 – 206.

Women, Murder and Femininity: Gender Representations of Women Who Kill will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in October 2010.