(Culture) War is Not a Metaphor

• In Event: Cultural Criminology Continues

Abstract

From its inception, cultural criminology has been a perspective devoted to documenting and intervening in the ways that cultural practices are used as pretense for criminalization and violence. While foundational studies of youth gangs, graffiti writers and urban consumers did just this, they also provided a target of critique for those insistent on adjudicating the boundaries of “serious crime” and what counts as “authentic resistance” to state power. Against the backdrop of the interminable “culture wars” this paper wades back into these stubborn debates, demonstrating the myriad ways the state’s war and police powers operate through and upon the terrain of culture. Through what we call culture proxy wars—issues that provoke outrage and fear through well-known signifiers that may directly or indirectly accomplish other, sometimes occluded political goals—we show how the demotic politics of “drugs, crime, immigration” provide the ideological basis for what is best understood as counterinsurgency war.

Authors

• Travis Linnemann, Kansas State University

• Corina Medley, Kansas State University