ragamouf

"Criminological theory has always implicitly drawn from common-sense
notions and scientific versions of the traits and capacities of men and women in ways that have disguised the complexity and mutability of masculinities and
femininities. Most often, criminological theory has relied on gender role theory: the idea that masculinity/femininity is an ideal aspired to by growing boys and girls, an ideal they are exposed to by socializing agencies and which they internalize without effort. Such a position is especially evident in writings on ‘crime’ as a resource for gender (e.g. Messerschmidt, 1993). The performative paradigm, where gender and sex are ruptured so that the presence of one no longer guarantees the other, has been taken up in analyses of contradictions in people’s presentation of gendered selves during undesirable events, though less often. Gender may be a resource for undesirable events (e.g. Miller, 2002), where participation in and/or avoidance of an undesirable event is dependent on a gender performative.
While Messerschmidt and Miller’s work represents an important break from conventional approaches to gender in criminology, they do not go far enough. Psychodynamic theory has tried to look at the ‘hidden’ connections
between visible power and more buried psychic vulnerabilities involved in ndesirable events (e.g. Jefferson, 2002). But less commonly has there been an interrogation of the very static ‘male’–‘female’ sex-bound subject categories that gird criminal justice practice, the very existence of the heterosexist matrix and its deployment in classificatory acts.
Most of the spaces of criminal justice rely on a gendered division of that space governed by conventional understandings of the self-evident sexed body as a purportedly clear articulation of gender. In courts, in policing, in jail and prison, in parole and so on, it is M or F. The law also relies heavily on such static binaries.
Criminal justice subsystems confine gender to one of two poles in the heterosexist matrix. Always at stake in the categorization of subjects is how those categories are organized over and against the subjects purportedly represented by them. A major problem develops in criminology’s constitution of subjects because criminology is a practice-driven industry. Categories developed in its theories are deployed in various criminal justice subsystems. Taking trans- as an organizing metaphor, as Noble suggests we do, for questioning criminal justice practices shows how the criminology that still implicitly relies on gender role theory is (1) incapable of moving toward analyses that locate masculinities across gender positions as gender positions are articulated differently over time, and (2) incapable of dermining the dominant approach in criminal justice to operate in terms of essentialist gender binaries."

Book Reviews: Jean Bobby Noble, Sons of the Movement: FtMs Risking Incoherence on a Post-Queer Cultural Landscape Toronto: Women’s Press, 2006. 143 pp. $34.95 (pbk). ISBN 088961461X Kevin Walby Theoretical Criminology 2007; 11; 314,
http://tcr.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/11/2/314