During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, phrenology as folk science featured prominently in two contrasting sites: the city, with its nooks of seamy thrills; and the bush, the stomping ground of itinerant male labourers. While phrenologists had long taken rooms in city markets and arcades, their work transformed by century’s end into a mystical hybrid of bumps, clairvoyance, palmistry and even tea-leaf reading. Urban diviners emerged concurrently with another archetype: the bush phrenologist of the new, masculinist ‘radical nationalist’ literary tradition. Bush phrenologists – real and imagined – echoed the resourcefulness of city diviners, switching between occupations and combining heads with palmistry and even water divining. But while urban divination was feminised and stigmatised, the male bush phrenologist often escaped the mark of perceived irrationality and exemplified a muscular identity. When pitted in court against working-class women or girls reporting assault, even the most disreputable bush phrenologist benefited from legalistic misogyny.

This chapter focuses on masculinities research as a diverse field of inquiry with many interrelated points of interests for discourses about crime and deviance. It explores 'critical masculinities theory', which coalesces around several shared assumptions: that masculinities are ‘plural, socially constructed, reproduced in the collective social practices of different men and embedded in institutional and occupational settings’ (Tomsen 2017: 816). From this perspective, masculinity is the product of a complex relation between multiple social structures, the institutions that are shaped by them, and the everyday practices of both men and women. These practices may include crime and deviance as resources for enacting particular hegemonic masculinities in specific contexts. In advancing thinking around the ‘maleness of crime’, critical masculinities theory encourage consideration of both the micro and the macro forces that shape behaviour.

This chapter draws on the works of key labelling theorists Howard Becker, Edward Lemert and Stanley Cohen to explore how individuals come to be labelled as deviant or criminal, the subsequent impact that labelling and stigmatisation can have on behaviour, and the need to carefully consider interventions to social issues that go beyond ‘law and order’ responses. First, the theoretical underpinnings of labelling theory, which are found within the sociological perspectives of social constructionism and symbolic interactionism, are discussed.