Queer Criminology as Discipline: What's at stake?

• In Event: Roundtable: Strange bedfellows or long-lost lovers? Queer Theory and Critical Criminology

Abstract

Although queer is now commonly used as an umbrella term for a multiplicity of sex/gender identities, it’s political invocation originally emerged from a critique of identity itself. In contrast to LGBT ‘rights and recognition’ seeking projects that sought inclusion, representation and normalization, queer politics and practice sought to question the norm itself and disrupt the assimilatory impulse of equality politics. In that sense, queer theory seems a natural ally of critical criminology in its questioning of logics of normalization / deviance and in seeking radical transformative possibilities. But what does it mean to translate these alliances into a new subdiscipline of ‘queer criminology’? Does this move risk the very institutionalization and normalization that queer theory and politics resists? Do these alliances offer greater space for queer critique or are they symptomatic of neoliberal identity politics and market-driven disciplinary expansion? Does queer theory and politics resonate more with ‘anti-criminology’ / ‘against criminology’ camps? Reflecting on these questions in light of recent scholarship in this area, this paper asks what is at stake – politically and theoretically – in the emergence of queer criminology as a subdiscipline.

Author

• Sarah Lamble, Birkbeck, University of London