Asserting Dominance: The Imprisoned Male Body and Masculine Hierarchies

• In Event: Masculinities and Gendered Identities

Abstract

Despite the importance of a gendered analysis of crime and deviance, criminology has a relatively short history of interrogating questions around masculinity and crime. While classic work has shown that crime is used as a resource for constructing class-specific forms of masculinity (for example, street crime and white-collar crime), few studies explore how masculine hierarchies both reinforce and transcend class differentials. Thus, criminology stands to benefit from scholarship that investigates how the broader gender structure is formed out of the dynamic relationship between the hegemonic and subordinate. This paper demonstrates how actors across the crime continuum engage and compete with each other for masculine dominance. Taking the mid-nineties U.S. moral panic around prison weight lifting as my point of departure, I suggest that the imprisoned male body both disrupts and reasserts masculine hierarchies. Furthermore, I argue that this case study highlights both political and cultural ideologies often overlooked in the study of crime and deviance.

Author

• Albert T. Novelozo, CUNY Graduate Center