2 - Queer Pathways

Summary

Introduction

Queer criminology aims to shed light on the ways that general criminology has overlooked the specific but interrelated contexts of offending behavior and queerness (Ball, 2014). Although there have been significant attempts to approach the LGBTQ+ populations as both victims and perpetrators of crime, these understandings largely stem from a cisheteronormative understanding of queerness that largely overlooks or misinterprets the individual's sexual minority status and gender expression as a criminological function (Ball et al., 2014). Although queer criminology itself is a new approach, it highlights how cisheteronormative structures create criminal propensity for people of all gender identities and sexual orientations. This chapter examines the pathways to crime approach, which argues that there are specific contextual factors that are related to an individual's position in society and their unique environments. This framework is helpful for fully understanding the role of sexuality and gender expression in offending patterns and in the victimization of the queer community.

Queer/ed criminology

Ostensibly, criminology has developed to favor the experiences of certain subjects and researchers (Ball, 2014); namely, the legacy of criminology paints the views of cisgender heterosexual white men in broad strokes as the de facto perspective. As we will discuss later, feminists highlight the systematic ways in which criminological discourse historically eschewed the unique experiences of women (Daly, 1992; Belknap, 2007), and critical race scholars point out how the nuanced way that race influences criminal propensity, policing, and recourse options was frequently overlooked (Brown, 2006; Burt et al., 2017; Omori, 2019). Similarly, the field of criminology has seen a much-needed influx of scholars who highlight the ways in which sexuality, sexual identity, and gender identity need to be analyzed, as there are some specific avenues in the study of crime, victimization, law, and deviance that benefit from the explicit analysis of the way cisheteronormative policing affects both cisgender heterosexual people and people across the LGBTQ+ spectrum (Ball, 2014).

The legacy of illicit LGBTQ+ existence is still found in the way that queer youth are treated by their schools, families, and the criminal justice system for their LGBTQ+ identities and how this contributes to criminogenic conditions. For instance, public schools are much more likely to punish LGBTQ+ students for public displays of affection compared with their straight peers (Snapp et al., 2015).