3 - Queer Criminology and the Destabilization of Child Sexual Abuse

Summary

Throughout the 2010s, queer criminology has firmly established itself as an important orientation within criminology. While its origins date back much further, its emergence was precipitated in particular by the publication of Dana Peterson and Vanessa R. Panfil's (2014) Handbook of LGBT Communities, Crime and Justice. This marked a sustained intervention into the field, bringing together a diverse range of voices to challenge an entrenched heteronormativity that has characterized broader criminological scholarship since its inception. In her foreword to the handbook, Jody Miller observes that there is a ‘vital need to bring a queer lens to every dimension of the field’ (2014, p. vii; my emphasis). In the short time following, this has been met with differing perspectives that offer the potential to ameliorate criminology's enduring neglect of sexuality and gender identities, and its momentum is attested by a growing number of collections that have been produced in the time since (Lamble, 2013; Ball et al., 2014; Buist & Lenning, 2015; Dwyer et al., 2016; Lamble et al., 2020). Collectively, this movement has been an important corrective to the tendency to take sex and gender for granted across criminological theorizing.

Across the breadth of this research, one characteristic has been an ongoing self-reflexiveness around the perimeters of what constitutes ‘queer criminology’. Put another way, the question of what is queer about queer criminology remains open-ended. Much of this work seeks to illuminate issues of crime and justice as they relate to the control of LGBTIQ people (Ball, 2014; Dwyer, 2014; Peterson & Panfil, 2014; Woods, 2014; Buist& Lenning, 2015). This includes how queer people figure as either offenders or victims, and how they experience institutions and processes of social control. While this work is theoretically informed, it tends to stand in contrast to that which is more explicitly informed by queer theory and which critically eschews an assimilationist stance in preference for a deconstructive approach to identity and/or institutions (see Lamble et al., 2020; Redd & Russell, 2020; Russell, 2020; Ball, 2014). In this way, these latter approaches tend to be less concerned with making a space for LGBTIQ communities within criminology per se, but rather to emphasize the political potentialities that may arise through a destabilization and deconstruction of categories of identity, and the technologies of power upon which they pivot.