POSTMODERN CRIMINOLOGY

Postmodern Criminology



Postmodern Criminology

Introduction

A problem in explaining critical criminology is that it has almost as many variations as it has practitioners. Some criminologists are interested in German critical theory, including such seminal thinkers as Jürgen Habermas; some focus on French social thinkers such as Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, or Jacques Lacan. Others use the term critical simply to mean that they write in a radical tradition that is critical of the way in which modern capitalist society is constructed. By the 1980s, the term critical criminology had begun to evolve into a description of an umbrella group of theories of the left that at times shared and at times did not share viewpoints. These groups achieved mainstream acceptance with the formation of the large division on critical criminology in the American Society of Criminology, and the section on critical criminology in the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. Most criminology textbooks today cover at least some of the elements of critical criminology.

Discussion

Because theories and theorists do not exist in isolation, and many writers draw from two or more traditions at the same time, the artificial boundaries between these theoretical positions are often blurred. One thing that all critical theories share is a common concern with class, or at least the economic structure of society, and the manner in which the inequalities of modern capitalist society influence crime. Race has been important to many theorists, and scholars in critical criminology increasingly take gender into account when developing their theories. The most cutting-edge work today not only includes race, class, and gender, but also attempts to locate the intersections between them. For example, in some circumstances, being an African American might be the primary influence on a person's behavior; in others it might be the fact of being a woman, or an African American woman, or a poor African American woman, or even just a poor woman. The person in question is the same woman, but in different circumstances she may call upon different resources.

Feminist Criminology

Within critical criminology, feminist thought rarely exists in isolation. One or more of the modes of thought outlined below almost invariably influences any particular feminist or profeminist author in addition to feminist theory. Nevertheless, there are some basic assumptions that all feminists can agree upon. Although rooted in some biological facts, gender is a constructed and relative reality, based on historical, cultural, and social influences. Feminists reject any notion that men or women act in a certain way, except as they are influenced in particular times by particular cultural or subcultural or personal forces. Gender relations in modern society tend to be based on systems of male dominance, and these relations fundamentally affect social life. In fact, society's very systems of common sense and ways of knowing things are determined in large part by gender.

There was in the past some tendency for feminists to mainly study female criminals and female victims. Their most important discovery was that theories thought to be theories of criminals were in fact ...