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Masculinities, Crime, and Criminal Justice
Criminology Department, University of Southern Maine
Professor of Criminology, University of Western Sydney
- Published: 11 February 2016
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This essay examines the link between crime and masculinity. It begins with an overview of traditional criminology that either ignored or had a skewed understanding of the nature of the crime–masculinity connection, focusing instead on biology, which often considered crime as a reflection of defective male and female bodies/identities. It then discusses the emergence of new studies on the association between crime and masculinity, informed by social theories of gender, power, and identity. In particular, it reviews Raewyn Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity as an explanatory model of different forms of masculinity. It also analyzes the life histories approach to masculinities and criminal justice.
I. The Masculinity–Crime Nexus
It is apparent that high levels of recorded and reported criminal offending reflect a real and pervasive social phenomenon of disproportionate male criminality. Arrest, self-report, and victimization data reflect that men and boys perpetrate more conventional crimes—and the more serious of these crimes—than do women and girls ( Beirne and Messerschmidt 2015 ). Criminologists have consistently advanced gender as the strongest single predictor of criminal involvement and, consequently, studying men and boys provides insights into understanding the highly gendered ratio of crime in industrialized societies. Historically, the reasons for this highly gendered ratio of crime have puzzled researchers, officials, and commentators. Much traditional criminological interest focused on why males, especially those from the working class, engaged in “dangerous” forms of crime (e.g., gang delinquency). Despite this near-exclusive interest in males rather than females, these discussions ignored how crime was connected to masculinity and how men and boys seek to attain power and status by displaying or seeking it in various social contexts ( Messerschmidt 1993 ).
Equipped with this “male norm” perspective, traditional criminologists proceeded to explore how crime is linked to a variety of factors (e.g., community disorganization, social learning, strain, lack of social bonds). In so doing, they failed to probe how crime is linked specifically to the gender of males, especially to nonpathological and widespread forms of masculine identity. The result has been a tendency to naturalize male offending and to revert to gender essentialism by explaining male wrongdoing as an inherent and presocial phenomenon to which men are drawn.
When they did consider gender, the earliest criminologists—such as Edwin Sutherland (1947 , 1956 [1942] ) and Albert Cohen (1955) —relied ultimately upon an essentialist “sex-role” framework to explain the relationship between masculinity and crime. That is, they presumed that a “natural” distinction existed between men and women, a distinction that led ineluctably to masculine men and feminine women. Accordingly, despite other substantive differences in their theories, these criminologists were united in arguing that certain innate or biological characteristics formed the basis of gendered social conditions—the male and female sex roles—that led to specific sexed patterns of crime. In other words, biogenic criteria allegedly established differences between men and women, and society culturally elaborated the distinctions through the socialization of sex roles. These sex roles, in turn, determined the types and amounts of crime committed by men and women, and by boys and girls. For these early criminologists, then, the body entered criminological theory cryptically as biological differences between men and women ( Messerschmidt 1993 ).
Notwithstanding, early criminologists like Sutherland and Cohen can be credited for putting masculinity on the criminological agenda. These scholars perceived the theoretical importance of gender and its relation to crime, and they acted upon that awareness. However, their conclusions demonstrate the limitations one would expect from any prefeminist criminological work. Gender essentialism was the accepted doctrine of the day; it took modern feminism to dismantle that powerful “commonsense” understanding of gender. Rather than being gender-blind, then, Sutherland and Cohen simply had a different conception of gender than exists among critical criminologists today. The social and historical context in which they wrote embodied (1) a relative absence of feminist theorizing and politics and (2) an assumed “natural” difference between men and women. Accordingly, it should not be surprising that they advanced these types of theories.
This focus on biology by early criminologists also often viewed crime as a reflection of defective male and female bodies/identities ( Gould 1981 ). And a range of subsequent accounts similarly disregarded the social link between crime and masculinity. These have included Marxist and left accounts that focused on class differences to explain crime, and then either relied on biological sex differences to explain the gendered pattern of most criminal offending or else said nothing about it ( Bonger 2003 ; Taylor, Walton, and Young 1973 ).
Early criminology either disregarded or struggled to explain the link between criminality and maleness, yet explanations have progressed rapidly in the last two decades. Contemporary research on masculinities and crime concentrates on the social construction of masculinities by both boys and men and on the “everyday” qualities of their aggressive and destructive forms. Since the 1980s, the shift to social constructionism has been a response to the wider reflection on gender and identity born of social movements including feminism, gay and lesbian activism, and sections of “the men’s movement.” In particular, research on violence against women has stressed the relationship between offending and everyday, often legitimated, constructions of manhood. In the academy, there has been a growth in research on male violence and a general expansion of research on masculinity (see Connell, Kimmel, and Hearn 2005 ; Kimmel 1987 ; Segal 1990 ).
This new field has been profoundly influenced by the theoretical contributions of Raewyn Connell (1987 , 1995 ), who developed a key explanatory model of different forms of masculinity. Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity has been defined not as a particular character type, but as an entire complex of historically evolving and varied social practices in societies that either legitimate or attempt to guarantee the shoring up of patriarchy and male domination of women. Hegemonic masculinity then is that form of masculinity in a particular social setting that structures gender relations hierarchically between men and women and among men. This relational character is central, in that it embodies a particular form of masculinity in hierarchical relation to a certain form of femininity and to various nonhegemonic masculinities.
Arguably, hegemonic masculinity has no meaning outside its relation to femininity—and nonhegemonic masculinities—or to those forms of femininity that are practiced in a complementary, compliant, and accommodating subordinate relationship with hegemonic masculinity. And it is the legitimation of this relationship of superordination and subordination whereby the meaning and essence of hegemonic masculinity are revealed. Moreover, any attainment or approximation of this empowered hegemonic form by individual men is highly contingent on the uneven levels of real social power in different men’s lives.
The mostly ill-fated effort to attain hegemonic masculinity among millions of men with highly limited sources of social power is reflected in a distinct form that occurs among men and boys in situations of marginal social status (e.g., uncertain or low-paying employment, members of minority groups). This marginalized form is referred to as “protest masculinity” ( Connell 1995 , p. 109). This is a concept that has been used before by criminologists, and it is similar to how a psychoanalytic perspective would describe the concept of “masculine protest.” It illuminates a particular kind of gender identity that is characteristic of men in a marginal social location. Like other men, they wish to claim that they exercise power and are in control in their lives. However, their masculine claim on power is contradicted by the reality that they are in a position of economic and social weakness. To openly display or prove their masculinity, they may overreact in a very hypermasculine and aggressive way by engaging in antisocial, violent, and criminal behavior. Frequently, “protest masculinity” is exhibited through overt misogyny, compulsory heterosexuality, and homophobia.
II. Contemporary Research on Masculinities and Crime
This model of “hegemonic” and other masculinities has been quite influential but also much contested in the social sciences, including criminology. For some liberal critics, this model may seem too closely tied to Marxist ideas about an overarching dominant ideology as a ruling set of oppressive masculine beliefs. Some critics have also suggested this model downplays social class and reflects a degrading view of working-class men as inherently violent and destructive ( Hall 2002 ). Jefferson (2002) suggests that this model results in a narrow view of masculinity as a set of personal attributes that are all negative. And Collier (1998) also argues that the model imprecisely offers a shifting notion of “masculinity” as comprising whatever it is that most men do in different contexts.
The criticisms discussed above have been soundly challenged ( Connell 2002 ; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005 ; Messerschmidt 1998 ). The concepts of hegemonic and marginalized masculinities have informed a rich and widening range of criminological studies that examine the full spectrum of masculine offending, and these concepts have well withstood over 25 years of research. Moreover, multiple patterns of masculinity have been identified in numerous studies, in a variety of countries, and in different institutional and cultural settings. And it is a widespread research finding that certain masculinities are hegemonic, necessarily in relation to femininities and nonhegemonic masculinities. That the concept of hegemonic masculinity captures the subordination of femininities and nonhegemonic masculinities as a social process has been well documented in many international settings ( Connell and Messerschmidt 2005 ).
Contemporary research on masculinities and crime draws out the experience of men as both offenders and victims and conveys that masculine crime is a varied struggle for power that includes violent and nonviolent offending. In what became known in the 1990s as the “new masculinities” approach, there has been an emphasis on the relations between different masculinities and very different forms of offending and victimization (see Newburn and Stanko 1994 ). This critical work in criminology has emphasized that masculinity helps to explain not only violent crime by less powerful men but also such diverse matters as motor vehicle offenses, theft, drug use and dealing, white-collar crime, and political crime, as discussed below.
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 linked intricately with struggles for social power that occur between men and women and among different men. They vary and intersect importantly with other dimensions of inequality. Messerschmidt’s (1993 , 2000 , 2004 , 2012 , 2014 ) influential accounts of crimes as “doing masculinity”—to be understood within a structured action framework—incorporate differences of class, race/ethnicity, age, sexuality, bodies, and the common concern with power. As there are different forms of masculinity that are differently linked to the attainment of social power, crime itself is a means or social resource/practice to construct masculinity, and analyses must balance consideration of structural forces and human agency. The following research examples draw out this central point.
Differences in masculinity that shape violence against women are a frequent topic of interest. The work of DeKeseredy and Schwartz (2005) has shown that for a variety of forms of male physical and sexual violence against women, the intent of the perpetrator often is to deploy violence as a means of presenting a particular type of dominating masculine image to himself, to the victim, and to his peer group. And the work of Cruz (2003) shows similar masculine dynamics among gay men involved in domestic violence. In a recent study of homicide and sexual assault of Asian women by stranger North American men, Park (2012) compares the motives of white men and non-Asian men of color as perpetrators. Park found more similarities than differences between these two differing rapist-murderers; specifically, through this violence both construct Western masculinities as an assertion of their “right” to place and space in national and global hierarchies that are informed by “the west’s deep hostility for, and admiration of, Asian men, nations and economies in the context of western constructs of Asia rising and the Asia Pacific century” (p. 493). In other words, through violence against Asian women, both White and non-Asian men of color, according to Park, are expressing their anxieties regarding alleged Western male decline in the face of the alleged “rising” Asian man. The surprising result, then, is that both White and non-Asian men of color uphold global White supremacy by asserting their violent masculine western dominance of Asian women who allegedly are unprotected by “weak” Asian men.
A key analysis of the early 1990s that was influenced by the new criminological interest in masculinities concluded that the typical “masculine scenarios” of most killings are disputes between men regarding insults and slights to personal honor or assaults directed at controlling female spouses and domestic partners ( Polk 1994 ). A detailed discussion of many incidents reflects the masculine and everyday forms of most fatal interpersonal violence, and this pattern of protecting honor spills over into the many cases of everyday male-on-male violence. Until recent decades, there has been scant analysis of masculine attitudes toward subjection to violence beyond the general finding that men as a group tend to be less fearful in relation to crime. Australian and European research within the new masculinities approach has studied the experience of confrontational violence by tracing the role of victimization in establishing power relations between men and the mixed effects on victims that both undermine and reinforce conventional ideas of masculinity ( Stanko and Hobdell 1993 ; Tomsen 2005 ).
Along these lines, research has also studied the targeting of men drawn from sexual minority groups. Research on antihomosexual killings has also suggested a masculine pattern in much of this violence and the official criminal-justice system’s response to it ( Tomsen 2009 ). Antihomosexual killings occur within two general masculine scenarios. Typically, they comprise fatal attacks in public space that are perpetrated by groups of young males concerned with establishing a manly self-image and more private disputes with allegations of an unwanted homosexual advance by a perpetrator protecting a masculine sense of honor and bodily integrity through retaliatory violence. Thus, many hate crimes (racist attacks as well as violence directed at gay men, lesbians, and transgender people) are not a form of offending that is wholly distinct from other masculine violence ( Tomsen 2001 ). Other Australian research of international significance to the study of masculinities and crime includes a rich analysis of the local cultures of male violence and aggression, and the exploitation of female sex workers in frontier mining settlements. Such masculine leisure practices are substantially condoned among company and political leaders as a seemingly inevitable aspect of the clustering of groups of men in harsh and homosocial environments in order to carry out the work that produces corporate profits and a large slice of national wealth ( Carrington, McIntosh, and Scott 2012 ).
In probably the best study to date on masculinities and street violence, Mullins (2006) presents an important account of how and why a specific form of hegemonic masculinity is embedded in the street life of St. Louis, Missouri. His analysis not only supports previous theoretical work on masculinity and street crime but also extends that work by demonstrating that street-life hegemonic masculinity can be understood only in its relationship to subordinated “punk” masculinities—masculinities that likewise are constructed in the same street-life culture—and in relation to particular femininities in that street culture. Mullins’s exposition of street violence is solid, confirming previous theoretical work that considerable violence among men in public settings results from masculinity challenges ( Messerschmidt 2000 ). Mullins explores how men within specific social situations come to view certain practices of other men as a threat to their masculinity, a threat that requires a culturally supported masculine response: physical violence. Moreover, he clarifies how such masculinity challenges can subsequently escalate, resulting all too often in the death of one or more of the male interactants.
Mullins’s analysis adds two new and intriguing dimensions to our understanding of men involved in street violence. First, he presents an incisive discussion of interaction among street men and the various women in their lives. Previous work on masculinities and street crime unaccountably ignores this salient component of gender relations. Mullins, however, uniquely explicates that such men tend to construct hegemonic masculinities—or those masculinities that fashion power relations between men and women and among men—over women on the street and/or over those sharing domestic households. Second, Mullins examines one of the most underexplored areas of research on masculinities in general: the contradictions involved in masculine constructions. The author lucidly illustrates how the men in his study vacillated among multiple meanings of masculinity according to their interactional needs.
A more recent study by Baird (2012) on gang violence and the construction of masculinity adds to Mullins’s conclusions. Baird examined boys from poor neighborhoods who joined gangs with boys who did not. He found that masculinity plays an integral role as to why violence is perpetrated by male gang members and that the gang becomes an attractive offering for “doing masculinity.” Boys who did not join gangs were more likely to have family support that helped them adopt a “moral rejection” of gangs, crime, and violence, which contributed to these boys embracing alternative nongang and nonviolent forms of masculinity. Boys who joined gangs were less likely to adopt “moral rejection,” primarily because of growing up in dysfunctional families; they were also more likely to admire older gang members and perceive the gang as an attractive pathway to masculine construction.
The narrow view that masculine crime solely comprises acts of physical violence has been balanced by accounts of gendered patterns of theft and fraud. An important early example of this view was an analysis of the particular masculine attractions that motor-vehicle offending and thefts hold for many working-class boys ( Cunneen 1985 ; see also Cunneen and White 1996 ). The broad potential of this explanation of nonviolent offending has been recognized in international studies; for example, an important interview study provides further understanding of the motivations and processes involved in the masculine magnetism to a range of nonviolent offending by exploring the group interactions and exchanges that precede collective offending—including robbery, burglary, and vehicle theft by groups of young risk-taking males ( Copes and Hochstetler 2003 ).
As an example of one of these crimes—robbery— Contreras (2009) examined how male robbers manipulate the masculinity of male drug dealers they victimize by employing female accomplices to lure them—for example, by walking by and making “eyes.” The drug dealers subsequently pursue the females and thereby are successfully set up to be robbed. Contreras argues that because drug dealers as “real men” consistently need to “prove” their heterosexual masculinity, they are mindlessly susceptible to female advances. Male robbers then construct a “superior” masculinity by such maneuvering of drug dealers’ heteromasculinity and through the exploitation of female accomplices. Finally, a recent study of illegal but nonviolent graffiti artists found that such “writers” construct a particular masculinity through their outlaw art and thereby achieve masculine status and respect among male peers ( Monto, Machalek, and Anderson 2012 ). By practicing this particular form of art, these “outlaws” orchestrate a masculinity that is admired for its flamboyant and edgy set of aesthetics as well as for its daring, risky, and rebellious significance.
In an interesting examination of how masculinity is tied to social class through economic fraud committed by socially privileged men, the authors did not attempt to uncover the causes of the criminal behavior, but rather they analyzed how the offenders subsequently explained and justified their actions ( Willott, Griffin, and Torrance 2008 ). Specifically, during the interviews the sample of privileged men drew on particular masculine discourses to present a cohesive and plausible account of their offending behavior. For example, the authors found that these men used the male breadwinner discourse (he is the economic “provider” for the family) but extended this notion to include employees and their families. That is, they described themselves as “normal men” who engaged in financial fraud unpretentiously to provide for their families and to protect their employees and their employees’ families from economic ruin. In this sense, then, these professional men constructed themselves in a specific middle-class masculine way—they must shoulder more responsibility than working-class men who are simply providers for their families but not protectors of others.
The masculine seductions of criminal risk at higher levels of social class and privilege are also apparent in a classic account of the 1985 Challenger disaster that seriously undermined confidence in the US space shuttle program. The fatal decision to launch against strong evidence of equipment failure and the resulting crew deaths reflected the dominance of a particular managerial masculinity that valued risk and decisiveness and discounted human consequences ( Messerschmidt 2014 ).
III. The Value of Life Histories
The new crime and masculinities research has included a variety of studies that seek out the viewpoints that inform masculine social action in relation to crime and criminal justice. The life-histories approach has focused attention on the embedded aspects of men’s criminal identity, social understandings of male and female bodies, the potential for desistance from delinquency and crime among different boys and men, and whether or not certain female offending can be understood as “masculine.” The tension between individual agency and objective factors experienced as the divide between human choice and external constraint in masculine criminal activity and the value of an insider understanding of that tension are evident in the fully ethnographic picture drawn by Bourgois’s (2002) study of New York crack dealers from a deprived Puerto Rican neighborhood. The men studied by Bourgois struggled for masculine respect through their wrongdoing. Drug dealing, violence, and sexual assaults provided a distorted mirror of the limited empowerment that was won by male forebears in a traditional rural patriarchy, where protection and provision for women and families were vital aspects of gender dominance. Graphic snapshots of brutality, gang rapes, and other crimes and cultural detail gathered by painstaking and dangerous fieldwork fleshed out the racialized, criminal masculinities assumed by these young men.
The theme of masculine crime in deindustrialized settings has been pursued by British and other ethnographic researchers studying nighttime leisure and related offending and policing ( Hobbs et al. 2003 ; Tomsen 1997 ; Winlow 2001 ). There are sensual attractions in the liminal “nighttime” economy for its many young participants, and an allied official ambivalence toward the male aggression and disorder that characterize it. In Monaghan’s (2002) insider account of “bouncing” in a study of private security officers working in nightclubs and pubs in city centers in southwest Britain, physicality and violent potential are transformed into a workplace skill built on the importance of forceful bodies. The mixed official response to the economic benefits and social costs of the expanding night economy that fosters drunkenness, male conflicts, and disorder problems is evident also in the discomfort with, and reliance on, the aggressive masculinity of security officers instructed to maintain a semblance of public order.
The danger of this work generates hierarchies of male physical ability within private policing, especially reflected in the masculine contrasts between “hardmen,” “shopboys” working security in retail stores, and “glass-collector types” who are less physically imposing and cannot deal with the risks of violent encounters. The same masculine hierarchy inflects the positioning of the minority of women working in this occupation; they are either denigrated as unmasculine and physically incapable or, in fewer cases, given a marginal position in a masculine hierarchy.
In a North American study, Anderson, Daly, and Rapp (2009) explored the relation between masculinities and crime within the hip-hop and electronic dance music nightclub scenes. The authors found that respondents who revealed they contextually constructed masculinity “upward” through excessive alcohol use, heightened sexuality, competitiveness, and commercialization were those most frequently involved in nightclub crime. These men defined “clubbing” as a status-oriented and hedonistic endeavor in which “they must toughen or macho up to navigate,” thereby constructing a masculine performance that often simultaneously leads to crime.
In one of Messerschmidt’s (2000) studies, a dynamic interplay of hegemonic and other masculinities is demonstrated through discussion of the lives of youth assaultive and sexual offenders from working-class neighborhoods. This interplay occurs against the backdrop of different relations between the male body (whether mature, masculine, and strong or physically small and weak) and achievable masculinities in different criminal pathways ( Messerschmidt 2000 ; see also Messerschmidt 2012 ).
Despite a recent attempt to challenge the notion that some girls/women under specific situations construct masculinities through criminal practices ( Irwin and Chesney-Lind 2008 ), the fact that gender is not determined biologically surely leads scholars to identify and examine possible masculinities by women and girls (and femininities by men and boys) and their relation to crime. There remains a necessity in the new masculinities criminological research to uncover girls’ and women’s relations to crime and violence, and to determine whether or not such social action constructs masculinity or femininity.
Jody Miller’s (2001 , 2002 ) important book, One of the Guys , shows that certain gang girls identify with the boys in their gangs and describe such gangs as “masculinist enterprises.” Pointing out that gender inequality was rampant in the mixed-gender gangs of which these girls were members—such as male leadership, a double standard with regard to sexual activities, the sexual exploitation of some girls, and most girls’ exclusion from serious gang crime—certain girls differentiated themselves from other girls through a construction of “one of the guys.” In other words, the notion “one of the guys” is not fashioned by being similar to boys (because of inequalities) but, rather, certain girls are different from other girls because they embrace a masculine identity. Miller’s research helps point scholars in an important direction for discovering how certain girls, like certain boys, can construct a masculine self through involvement in crime.
Similarly, in his book Flesh & Blood , Messerschmidt (2004) demonstrated through a study of adolescent assaultive violence that numerous gender constructions by violent girls were prevalent, and that some girls “do” masculinity by in part displaying themselves in a masculine way, by engaging primarily in what they and others in their milieu consider to be authentically masculine behavior, and by outright rejecting most aspects of femininity.
In addition to eschewing possible masculinities by girls and women and femininities by boys and men, most writing on crime and masculinity concentrates on the mind while ignoring the body . Messerschmidt’s (2014 , 2012 ) work, however, highlights how violent boys and girls interact with and through their body. The interview data in his studies demonstrate that the body is not neutral in “doing masculinity” (or femininity) but, rather, it is an agent of social practice. Often, the body initially constrained, yet eventually facilitated, gendered social action; it mediated and influenced future social practices. Given the social context, bodies could do certain things but not others—the bodies of these youth are “lived” in terms of what they can “do.” Consequently, for these youth, “doing masculinity” (or femininity) is experienced in and through the body: eventually they literally construct a different body and, thus, a new gendered self through their embodied everyday violent practices such as engagement in fights and full-contact sports.
The life-histories approach has also been deployed to offer clues about questions raised by nonoffenders. As crime is a ready resource for attaining masculinity, particularly among socially marginal or highly competitive groups of men, researchers wonder what this means for the masculinity of nonoffenders. Accordingly, British researchers have explored the subjective significance of “desistance” for male working-class offenders ( Gadd and Farrall 2004 ). Ending criminal offending and criminal careers is a puzzle for conventional criminology that the masculinities approach may help to unravel. By balancing individual agency with structural determination (of the sort stressed in research on risk factors and life-course stages), these researchers conclude that desistance is a complex gendered process.
A detailed discussion of life circumstances reveals the contradictory nature of this desistance. An apparent ending to criminality is shaped around heroic male discourses of redemption and protectiveness and the uncertain possibilities of male renunciation of actual or fantasized violence, the latter being more widespread and commonly shared by offenders and other males alike. Although Gadd and Farrall undoubtedly uncovered some of the reasons for desistance, more recently Carlsson (2013) showed how both persistence in and desistance from crime are imbued with age-specific notions of masculinity at different stages of the life course. For example, Carlsson found that at specific times in life (e.g., early adulthood), certain practices, such as having a good job and/or forming a family, become more important markers of masculinity than other practices, such as risk taking, which is more likely to center the self during teenage years. Consequently, desistance from crime is clearly related to age-specific meanings of masculinity.
An additional value of insider understanding in accounts of masculine offending and nonoffending is signaled by a study of young Australian men and security officers involved in regular episodes of drinking violence and disorder ( Tomsen 2005 ). The point is that although the link between masculinity and criminality has been newly emphasized, researchers have minimal understanding of the means by which withdrawal from violence fits with a socially respected masculine identity. “Disengagement” is understood here as a process of situational decision making and withdrawal from conflicts and offending that may characterize a broad population of noncriminal men, rather than as any full desistance from a set criminal pathway and identity. Involvements in drinking-related public violence are tied to matters of male group status, the protection of honor in episodes involving insults and slights that must be addressed, and the collective pleasure of carnival-like rule breaking in public disorder (see Tomsen 1997 ).
IV. Masculinities and Criminal Justice
This new literature on crime and masculinities has also increasingly come to stress that there is a broad relation of masculinities to the entire criminal justice system. Key criminal justice institutions that shore up social order, including the police, security, criminal courts, and prisons, are masculine at their core. Along with the military, they form what can be viewed as the masculine hard edge of the gendered state (Connell 1990). Nevertheless, the masculine relation between the criminal-justice arena and crime in this area is not straightforward. Given their final position as guarantors of the state monopoly of violence, these agencies assume a contradictory role in relation to violent and destructive masculine acts and practices. This is seen in practices that reflect the condoning of valued “law and order” masculine aggression and the disavowal of its everyday expression in acts perpetrated by working-class, poor, and minority males.
A growing number of studies in this new field explores the ties between masculinity and these elements of the criminal - justice system and take a close look at the relations that exist between criminal “protest” masculinities and “official” state masculinities in this sphere. Any full understanding of this evidence must consider the ways in which criminalized masculinities are produced in tension with the official forms of masculinity inscribed in policing and criminal-justice systems. As Connell (1995) has suggested, dynamic relationships exist between hegemonic and other subordinated or marginalized forms of masculinity that produce different masculinities and gender politics within masculinity. The criminological implication is that social forms of masculinity linked to violence and offending are both produced and policed by aspects of the criminal-justice system and state institutions.
In this sense, Hall’s (2002) critique of hegemonic masculinity does usefully draw attention to the interrelation of different masculinities, and how problematic conceiving the differences between hegemonic and potentially criminal protest masculinities has become for criminologists with an elastic use of these terms in some discussions of male criminality. Furthermore, the hypocrisy of commentators in this field to which he refers suggests that there remains an insufficient understanding of the condoning and cultivation of violent forms of masculinity by capitalist, imperial, and contemporary postcolonial nation-states. Masculine violence is deployed internally and externally in a range of state forms, and both legitimated and denounced in different historical and social circumstances.
The paradox of regulating criminalized masculinities with the formally law-abiding though sexist and aggressive official masculinities of criminal-justice systems is reflected in research on policing ( Prokos and Padavic 2002 ). For example, Nolan (2009 , p. 250) recently discussed the existence in policing of an “idiosyncratic construct of masculinity that privileges tacit conspiracies of silence,” thereby validating heterosexuality, hierarchical regimentation, homosocial bonding, homophobia, and paternalistic misogyny among North American male police officers. And responses to criminal-justice intervention that foster and reproduce masculinities with a direct or indirect relation to criminality are uncovered in other contemporary studies. Most notably, analysis of the general failure of prisons to deter crime or to rehabilitate inmates with any certainty is now informed by accounts of inmate masculinity, illustrating the sharp struggles over male power and status and the masculine hierarchies that characterize prison subcultures and the lives of incarcerated men.
An interview study with British prisoners suggests that a specific form of masculinity that is hard, aggressive, bullying, and conformist is a usual adaptation to prison ( Jewkes 2005 ). Prisons cause a dehumanizing impact that threatens personal identity through a climate of “mortification and brutality.” This impact engenders a hard masculine social performance among inmates. Jewkes’s analysis and related work on prison masculinities cogently suggest that aspects of the intervention process itself affirm destructive forms of male identity, to which criminal-justice systems ostensibly are opposed ( Sabo, Kupers, and London 2001 ; Whitehead 2000 , 2005 ).
This contradiction leads to a major conceptual problem for the new crime and masculinities paradigm, as a critical analysis of masculine offending necessitates an understanding of the historically shifting and fluid ways that destructive masculinities have been either condoned or denounced by policing and criminal-justice systems. Moreover, this problem results in dilemmas for programs of punishment, correction, and crime prevention that may appear both to treat and foster male criminality ( Holland and Scourfield 2000 ).
Feminists have been critical of the way in which male violence against women has been simultaneously denounced yet condoned or ignored in the wider culture and in traditional “hands off” police responses. Further examples of the mixed official reaction to male violence from the new literature on masculinity and crime concern the shifting historical responses to public violence and various forms of hate crime ( Tomsen 2001 ). In many of these cases, discouraged reporting, lax policing, and lenient sentences signal support for the generation of an aggressive masculinity in relation to public leisure and spaces. Male-on-male violence that results from this may be regarded as a minor public nuisance or an inevitable aspect of the social reproduction of appropriate masculinities.
Furthermore, violence and criminal offending by groups of men can also signal resistance against social hierarchy. Historical and cross-cultural scholarship has convincingly demonstrated that much male violence is an ambiguous form of protest or rebellion against social hierarchies based on social class, caste, and racial/ethnic differences. This research includes studies of disorder, unruly leisure, festivals, carnivals, and more direct acts of insubordination, including rallies and riots, as means of symbolic protest and collective cultural resistance to the moral values of ruling groups ( Tilly 2003 ). In fact, official and police concerns over collective male disorder that refer to a compelling need to protect the broader public are driven also by anxiety about the symbolic challenge to state, class, and racial authority that this disorder can comprise.
These different examples reflect the complexities of official reactions and the criminalization process in relation to different crimes and masculinities. Male crime is gendered crime; yet when commentators on the masculinity–crime nexus cannot acknowledge the link between the bulk of male offending and such other factors as social class and race, they risk inadvertently naturalizing male offending. The dilemmas of problematic-gendered male offending and an overlapping criminalization process are evidenced in the debate raised by contentious crimes and their policing. For example, the ongoing concern in Australia over how to deal progressively with the issue of domestic and sexual assaults in indigenous communities has become increasingly public ( HEREOC 2006 ). Indigenous people, and in particular indigenous boys and men, are disproportionately subjected to police surveillance, prosecution, and then incarceration in juvenile detention centers and adult prisons. In such contentious cases, different forms of violence are related to particular racialized protest masculinities that reflect distinct histories of marginality due to the effects of migration and racial dispossession in a White Anglo-dominated culture. And in the United States, more African-American men are under the control of the criminal-justice system than were enslaved in 1850, resulting in racial segregation being replaced by mass incarceration as “the new Jim Crow” form of social control ( Alexander 2010 ).
The casting of an increasingly wide net of social control recently was highlighted by Victor Rios (2011) , who shadowed the everyday lives of 40 delinquent black and Latino boys for three years in Oakland, California. Thirty of these boys had previously been arrested and they all lived in high-crime neighborhoods. Rios also interviewed another 78 boys from these same neighborhoods, and he concluded from the data generated that the social system of control in the lives of these boys impacts their future masculine and criminal behavior.
Rios introduced the concept of the youth control complex , or “a ubiquitous system of criminalization molded by synchronized, systematic punishment meted out by socializing and social control institutions” (p. 40). The youth control complex impacts the future outcome of these boys, Rios argues, through the combined effects of schools, families, businesses, residents, media, community centers, and the criminal-justice system that “collectively punish, stigmatize, monitor, and criminalize young people in an attempt to control them” (p. 40). Through institutionalized mechanisms of social control, the ongoing developing masculinity of these boys is challenged through systematic marking them as criminal. Indeed, the youth control complex involves both “material” and “symbolic” criminalization. For Rios, the former involves, for example, police harassment, exclusion from businesses and public recreation spaces, in-school detention rooms, and school suspensions; the latter includes, for example, surveillance, profiling, stigma, and degrading forms of interaction. Rios argues the result of the youth control complex is that these young men become adversarial toward society, they lose faith in its institutions, and they begin to resist it and build various resilient skills to cope.
Rios emphasizes that the youth control complex collectively impacts these boys because it is the sum of the punitive parts that is most damaging. Although it may seem trivial, if a boy is “called a ‘thug’ by a random adult, told by a teacher that he will never amount to anything, and frisked by a police officer, all in the same day, this combination becomes greater than the sum of its parts” (p. 40). And it is this sum that creates the condition for certain types of masculinity and crime. Rios demonstrates that for the most part, the youth control complex offers the boys meanings of masculinity that emphasize conformity to a subordinated racialized social status and, therefore, many of the boys find that the alternative to conformity is to become “hard”; that is, to survive on the street one must construct a hypermasculinity.
And this hypermasculinity found embedded in the street culture is likewise reinforced through certain aspects of the youth control complex, especially institutions of the criminal-justice system. For example, Rios (p. 138) observes that police officers frequently used “a brutal masculinity that inculcated a toughness, manliness, and hypermasculinity in the boys. This hypermasculinity often influenced the young men to perpetrate defiance, crime, and violence, sanctioning police to brutalize or arrest them.” The result becomes a cycle whereby the boys practice a hypermasculinity on the streets, certain aspects of the youth control complex generate meanings supporting that notion of masculinity, and the boys are channeled into crime and the criminal-justice system.
It is well known to criminologists that men have a virtual monopoly on the commission of syndicated, corporate, and political crimes ( Beirne and Messerschmidt 2015 ; Messerschmidt 1995 ). These insights into the masculinity of corporate and economic crime might well inform the recent criminological interest in state and “war” crime. There is a range of major public institutional offending—including internal and external official violence, paramilitary activity, and warfare—that also is deeply masculine, yet remains a fertile but mostly untouched field for researchers. A new criminological understanding of the ambiguous response of the nation-state and its elite leadership to masculine violence and destructiveness has great potential to foster a critical focus on the global occurrence of acts of terror, human-rights abuses, and political and military violence.
Destructive military masculinities have been of particular concern in recent discussions about the potential success of international peacekeeping efforts in a range of postwar settings ( Breines, Connell, and Eide 2000 ). And one of Messerschmidt’s (2010) recent works— Hegemonic Masculinities and Camouflaged Politics: Unmasking the Bush Dynasty and Its War Against Iraq— investigates the orchestration of regional and global hegemonic masculinities through the speeches of the two US Bush presidents—George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush—that contrast forms of communicative social action to “sell” the longstanding war against Iraq. In this study, Messerschmidt makes the case that there are evolving hegemonic masculinities. He then outlines how state leaders may appeal to particular hegemonic masculinities in their attempts to “sell” wars and thereby camouflage salient political and criminal practices that subsequently and significantly violate international law.
There also is the danger that destructive military masculinities enacted abroad will be transferred to the United States and other liberal democracies and shape gendered aspects of policing. This possibility has been signaled by a recent analysis of the growing use of lethal military weaponry, such as killer drones, for more routine use in domestic law-enforcement settings. In particular, this illuminates the masculine attractions of such lethal “game-like” technology for police officers and officials, and the need to recognize and contest the masculinity of related paramilitarism ( Salter 2013 ).
V. Conclusion
Although traditional criminology either ignored or had a skewed understanding of the nature of the link between crime and masculinity, in recent decades this has been mapped and explored in new studies informed by social theories of gender, power, and identity. Research findings affirm the overall value in acknowledging the link between crime and masculinities. And this research demonstrates how masculine offending varies by social context and social position (class, race, age, and sexuality). Crime by boys and men may appear to be inevitable, even abhorrent. Yet there is scant progressive gain in simple essentialist understandings of male offending, a denial of human agency, or a cynical dismissal of substantial efforts to educate and promote diverse and nonviolent masculinities among marginalized boys and men. And being critically aware of the extent and effects of the criminalization process and its secondary effects in racist and class-divided societies requires a constant reflexivity in analyzing the masculinity–crime nexus. Indeed, it has become necessary to critically appreciate the importance of the masculine logic and practices of the criminal-justice system itself. Criminal-justice agencies define and punish criminalized masculinities, but often in a contradictory fashion and with a seemingly arbitrary line between acceptable and deviant violent and destructive masculinity. A growing but still limited criminological focus on the actions of more powerful men in corporate, state, and elite roles signals a new importance of nascent studies of masculinity and corporate harm, state crime, and war crime in a national and global frame.
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James W. Messerschmidt: Crime as Structured Action: Doing Masculinities, Race, Class, Sexuality, and Crime
Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2014, 143 pp
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- Published: 12 January 2014
- Volume 22 , pages 455–458, ( 2014 )
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Alexander, Michelle. (2012). The New Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness . New York: The New Press.
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Glover, K.S. James W. Messerschmidt: Crime as Structured Action: Doing Masculinities, Race, Class, Sexuality, and Crime. Crit Crim 22 , 455–458 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-014-9233-8
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This essay examines the link between crime and masculinity. It begins with an overview of traditional criminology that either ignored or had a skewed understanding of the nature of the crime–masculinity connection, focusing instead on biology, which often considered crime as a reflection of defective male and female bodies/identities. It then ...
In Masculinities and Crime, James Messerschmidt presents a solid review and critique of existing feminist and criminological theory. He not only takes criminology to task for failing to adequately deal with issues of gender, but he also critiques existing feminist theories for their failures as well (both in and out of a criminological context).
Masculinities and Crime. Simon Winlow reconsiders the social, cultural and economic context of 'criminal masculinities'. M asculine identity, and the relationship between masculinity and crime, has rightly been the focus of a great deal of academic attention over the last ten years.
It then discusses the emergence of new studies on the association between crime and masculinity, informed by social theories of gender, power, and identity. In particular, it reviews Raewyn Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity as an explanatory model of different forms of masculinity.
Masculinities and Crime. S. Winlow. Published 1 March 2004. Sociology. Criminal Justice Matters. Masculine identity, and the relationship between masculinity and crime, has rightly been the focus of a great deal of academic attention over the last ten years.
The relationship between men, masculinities and crime has, in recent years, assumed an increasing visibility, prominence and political significance within both the academic discipline of criminology and in relation to a series of public and high-profile debates around crime, criminality and social (dis)order.
Messerschmidt’s update of his original 1997 Crime as Structured Action offers a collection of case studies that take an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the influences of gender, race, class, and sexuality on crime and in particular how crime manifests as expressions of these attributes.
This chapter provides an overview of key features of criminological literature regarding masculinity and crime, as well as some of the significant empirical studies. It describes the evident strengths of "masculinities" paradigm in criminology.
This chapter outlines key theoretical developments that have characterized criminological explanations of the widespread link between masculinities and crime.
The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of an exploratory study of criminally defined physical violence. It places men's responses explicitly within takes masculinity seriously. This paper concludes by raising theoretical issues about.