Feminist Criminology: Gain, Loss and Backlash

© 2007 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Sociology Compass 2/1 (2008): 48–61, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00052.x

Feminist Criminology: Gain, Loss and Backlash

Dawn Moore*Department of Law, Carleton University

AbstractSurviving the inevitable process of innovation, critique and response thataccompanies conceptual invention, feminist criminology is now a rich anddiverse field of scholarship and political activism. This article follows the mainthreads of feminist criminological thought (empirical, standpoint and post-modern), outlining the tensions and connections between each. I then considerthe political ground gained and lost by feminist criminologists, paying carefulattention to the ways in which feminist ideas have been co-opted by governingauthorities and also considering the current climate of backlash against feministideas in both criminal justice policy and the academy.

Second-wave feminism1 midwifed an array of woman-focused movementswithin the social sciences. Emerging as its own (inter)discipline at the sametime, criminology also benefited from and was shaped by early feministtreatments. The work of criminology’s foremothers, such as Meda Chesney-Lind, Francis Heindesohn and Carol Smart, laid the foundations in the 1970sfor a strong movement of feminist criminology, constituting what is now arich body of scholarship that draws on and contributes to a textured fieldof disciplinary, theoretical and political traditions.

Surviving the inevitable process of innovation, critique and responsethat accompanies conceptual invention, feminism is now framed as enteringits third wave, flagging shifts and fragmentations apparent in contemporary,feminist informed criminological projects. Today feminist criminologylacks coherence, consistency and is somewhat removed from the theoreticaland epistemological approach that marked the second wave. Still, thetenants of feminist empiricism and standpoint are by no means erasedfrom the landscape of the rather broad swath of material referenced asfeminist criminology. Research aligning itself with the feminist movementnow constitutes a richly textured and diverse field that draws on an arrayof theoretical traditions and speaks to a variety of substantive areas.

While the evolution of feminist thought and political activism are oftencredited with important gains not only in the realms of feminist theorizingof crime but also in the all too important project of improving the livedexperiences of women involved in the criminal justice system, there is also

© 2007 The Author Sociology Compass 2/1 (2008): 48–61, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00052.xJournal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Feminist Criminology: Gain, Loss and Backlash 49

good reason at the present juncture to be concerned about the state offeminist criminology. Looking back on gains made there are now numerousexamples of the co-optation of feminist ideals as they are translated intocriminological practice. At the same time, worries (re)emerge aboutbacklash against feminist thought. At a point when many (in political,policy and academic circles) would write feminism off as a largely irrelevantproject whose time has come and gone, others fear that women are losingground in a criminal justice system that is increasingly oriented towardslaw and order politics.

The ambitious aim of this paper is to provide an overview of thegrowth of feminist thought within criminology over the last 40 years. Ioffer a truncated consideration of the major schools of feminist thought(empiricism, standpoint and postmodernism). Following this, I take stockof the current climate of feminist projects within criminology andcriminal justice systems, detailing some of the most salient concernsshared by scholars in the field.

Feminist empiricism

In her feminist history of criminology, Naffine (1996) makes clear thatthe greater portion of criminological thought has been and continues tobe dedicated to the study of men as the norm. Charting the rise ofcriminology as a discipline, Naffine shows how the gender blind orientationof the vast majority of criminologists has led to a particularly masculinistframework that assumes the man as the normal subject of criminologicalinquiry. Up until the 1970s, the male norm was so pervasive that virtuallyno research existed which considered the experiences of women involvedin the criminal justice system (as either victims or offenders), let alone therole of gender in the carriage of criminal justice.

Feminist empiricism (Harding 1986) emerged as a response to the dearthof knowledge about women in social sciences more generally. Withincriminology, feminist empiricism, as Naffine (1996, 30) explains,

... endeavors to develop a scientific understanding of women as the missingsubjects of criminology, to document their lives both as offenders and asvictims. It also points out the crude stereotyping of women that has rep-resented the official wisdom on women in criminology and in the criminaljustice system.

From the feminist empirical movement in criminology, we are giveninitial and still fundamental accounts of women offenders (Carlen 1988;Heidensohn 1985), as well as the documentation of women’s experiencesas victims of crime (Smart 1989; Stanko 1984).

The best scholarship born of the feminist empirical movement is notdesigned specifically to reveal the sexist nature of the criminal justicesystem (even if the system is regularly unveiled as discriminatory) but is

50 Feminist Criminology: Gain, Loss and Backlash


instead intended to document and theorize the gendered nature ofcriminal justice operations and criminological thought. This distinction isvital in light of the familiar criticism of feminist thought more generallythat it is a rather blunt instrument designed to promote a form of equalityintended to effect balance by bringing the treatment of women closer tothe male norm. This is a particularly salient concern in the field ofcriminology where the male norm is more often than not a brutal benchmark and, in the context of those who have been victims of crime,ignores the gendered nature of violence altogether. Thus, feministempiricism is not intended to reveal that women in prison ought to betreated the same as their male counterparts just as it does not endeavor toset (male centred) norms for the treatment of victims of sexual or domesticviolence. Instead, the general project here (if we can safely agree there isone) is to reveal women’s unique experiences and destabilize the assumptionthat all we need do to correct the gender imbalance in criminology is to‘add women and stir’. Feminist empiricism resists the suggestion that wecan simply extend what we know about men to include women as well.This observation is applied to our knowledge about criminal behaviour aswell as experiences of victimization.

One of the earliest and most enduring projects of feminist, empiricalcriminology was to correct the invisibility of women in conflict with thelaw from understandings of incarceration (Snider 2003, 354). Womenhave always been considered too few to count (Adelburg and Currie1993) within the realm of punishment, consistently comprising less than10% of the total population of prisoners.2 The low numbers of womenhas meant not only that their existence in prisons was ignored for thebetter part of a century, but also that prison policies and programs have,up until quite recently, done very little to recognize and attend to thedifferences between male and female prisoners.

Feminist scholars have worked hard to respond to this gender gap bystudying the experiences and treatment of women in prison. Fairly con-sistently revealed are a number of observations about the gendered natureof punishment. First, it is clear that women’s criminality is quite differentthan that of men. Women offenders are under-represented in every categoryof violent and white collar crime and notably over-represented only inthose crimes that clearly have gendered components (such as prostitution,abortion and infanticide; Boritch 1997; DeKeseredy 2000; Kramar 2005).Women offenders are also more likely to have been the victims of sexualand physical violence, have a male co-accused and have serious and extensivehistories of both sexual and physical trauma and abuse (Shaw 1993, 50).

Second, women in prison experience the pains of imprisonment moreacutely. Incarcerated women are more likely to self injure, suffer frommental health problems and attempt suicide than are men. Up untilrecently, programming and facilities for women in prison were woefullylacking. The infamous prison for women in Canada, for example, had a



long-standing reputation for being one of the harshest, most brutalinstitutions in the nation, sentiments that served as the impetus for callsfor its closure by several Commissions of Inquiry.

Third, women have also been routinely handed different sentences forthe same crimes. The courts’ own gendered lenses resulting, in somecases, in more lenient sentences as judges take pity on (usually white)women who conform to traditional gender roles and, in (many) othercases, in harsher sentences rationalizing the need for additional punishmentthrough the added aggregation of femininity linked with masculinized crimesor for those women whose criminality (Carlen 1983; Eaton 1986; Rafter2000) or selfhood runs counter to popular notions of the good woman.

Feminist scholarship has also been tantamount in giving voice to theexperiences of women as victims of crime. Feminist victimology raisesawareness of the pervasiveness of violence against women and children,highlighting the regularity of both physical and sexual assaults perpetuated,largely, by men (Carrington and Hogg 2002). Importantly here, early feministcriminologists were able to debunk the popularly held assumption thatmost sexual assaults are committed by strangers by illustrating the pervasivenessof sexual assaults in interpersonal relationships (Smart 1989; Stanko 1984).

At the same time, feminist empirical work has also raised awareness ofthe condition of women working and serving in the criminal justicesystem. From historical accounts of women barred from law schools andjuries to contemporary documenting of sexual harassment, discriminationand the glass ceiling for women employed in criminal justice- and law-relatedprofessions (Brockman 2001; McMahon 1992; Sheehy and McIntyre2006), this scholarship lends an appropriate degree of reflexivity to emergentfeminist criminological knowledge, revealing gendered practices at allstations of the criminal justice system.

Despite many important gains in criminological knowledge andcriminal justice practice, feminist empiricism is not without its detractors.The most vocal here is the claim that, in asking the woman question incriminology, scholars are still not challenging or dislocating the malenorm. Instead, there is criminology and then feminist criminology, amarginalized and oft ignored form of inquiry. An approach to criminologythat takes as a fundament the notion of gender would be more inclinedto read gender into all criminological study, calling on researchers todistinguish their work not only when it is work on women (as if researchingwomen is a divergence) but also when the work is about men. In sodoing, the notion of masculinity, a long-maligned problem for feministand mainstream scholars (even if only by virtue of silence) (Naffine 1996,50), gets framed also as a subject of criminological inquiry. Thus, malenessis no longer the norm but instead another variable to be considered.

More recent critical criminological work trains the analytic gaze ontothe question of masculinity. For example, Walklate’s (1995) Gender andCrime textbook offers feminist inspired accounts of male criminality.



Strange’s (2003, 310) treatment of femicide applies a feminist frameworkas a means of understanding historical responses to violence againstwomen within an almost exclusively male justice system. And Hird’s(2002) comprehensive study of interpersonal violence is equally diligentin unpacking expectations of masculinity she sees as structurally bound togendered violence.

Standpoint feminism

Harding (1986) also identifies standpoint feminism as a major movementin feminist thought. Framed by the feminist adage ‘the personal is political’,standpoint feminism draws on women’s experiences in order to constitutea feminist knowledge base organized to resist forms of patriarchal3 oppressionby asserting narratives that run counter to dominant, male perspectives.As Smart (1995) points out, standpoint feminism constitutes a relativelysmall body of criminological knowledge. Still, it has been central toaddressing issues of women’s victimization.

Standpoint feminism starts with the premise that women’s experiencesare shaped by the struggle against patriarchy or the domination of men.While, as Smart (1995) observes, standpoint feminism does not have a majorplace in criminology, it has factored into feminist considerations ofvictimization, especially in regard to the anti-violence against womenmovement. Here, feminist scholars have insisted on foregrounding thevoices of women who have experienced violence with the goal ofconstituting these women (not scholars) as experts of their own experiencesand victimizations. The woman’s own perspective is important because onlyby being empowered to define what it means to be victimized and toexplain the conditions under which victimization can occur are we everable to approach an authentic understanding of phenomena such asinterpersonal violence, placed in the context of women’s realities.

From the perspective of standpoint feminism, then, an event such as arape trial becomes a theatre of oppression. When a woman forwards aclaim that she has been raped her experience must be tailored to fit thedefinitions of the crime as set out by the criminal law. The very act ofcharging someone with rape is one of erasing a woman’s experience.Rape, as with any crime, is ultimately an offense against the state, not theindividual (this is why we note criminal trials as The People or the Queenv. the accused). Likewise, the process of investigating rape is not onedirected by the victim. It is, instead, one controlled almost entirely bypolice and prosecutors. It is these officials who will decide what evidenceis to be used, how a woman may present her experiences, what backgroundinformation is relevant to the case and even whether or not the woman’sclaims to having been assaulted are meritous in the first place.

Standpoint is designed as a remedy to the problem of women’s experiencesbeing framed by others. In creating an arena in which women can speak



for themselves, the intention is to provide counter-narratives of criminaljustice events like the rape trial. An excellent example of this is the Canadianstory of Jane Doe (Doe v. Metropolitan Toronto (Municipality) Commissionersof Police, 1989), a woman who sued the Metro Toronto Police Service fornegligence in the wake of her own rape. Jane Doe (whose identity ispermanently protected by a publication ban) wrote and published her ownaccount of the investigation and trial or her rape as well as the subsequentcivil trial concerning her suit against the police. Doe repeatedly suggeststhat her account is fundamentally important because her own voice andexperiences were silenced in traditional justice channels.

Standpoint feminism is also a feature of more recent writing on women’simprisonment (Carlen 1983; Horii, Parkes and Pate 2006). In Carlen’s work,criminalized women became the scriptors of their own stories, co-authoring(and in many cases authoring) accounts of their own tales. Carlen’s workforwards feminist criminology in a number of different ways. Mostimportantly, in creating space for women to become experts on theirown experiences, otherwise unrecognized issues in the treatment of womenprisoners come to the fore. For example, while a woman who is ‘actingout’ in prison (mouthing off to guards, giving other prisoners a hard time)might be viewed by prison officials as coming out of her desire to be inti-midating or to gain status in the prison, that same woman writing about herexperiences explains how closely her seemingly unruly behaviour in prisonis linked to her past histories of trauma and abuse and for her representsa means of survival rather than a strategy of domination (Comack 1996).

The goal of standpoint feminism in criminology has largely been to freefeminist accounts of women’s experiences in the criminal justice systemfrom the need to be consistently positioned in relation to male knowledgesand understanding. Crafting accounts of women’s experiences taking theoppressive and male centred nature of the criminal justice system as apoint of departure, allowing for the generation of a woman centredknowledge base that eschews the male norm.

If standpoint gave and continues to give important voice to marginalizedwomen in the criminal justice system, it too must, at the same time, berecognized for its shortcomings. The main problem with standpointfeminism, as Naffine (1996, 50) points out, is constituency or the questionof which population is meant to be represented by which voice. As aself-professed feminist criminologist, I do not imagine that I could everserve as a spokesperson for other feminist criminologists, even as myexperience, according to the very tenants of standpoint, ought to legitimizemy expertise in this field. Many of the other feminist criminologists withwhom I work, let alone the women working in criminology who do notembrace the feminist label, have very different experiences and viewswhen compared with mine, even if we share a particular standpoint (inthis case as feminist criminologists). In asserting my views and speakingfrom my experiences I am not equipped to become a mouthpiece because



I can not include in my experience the array of other experiences thatwill, no doubt, be shaping the views and experiences of my colleagues.Thus, even if my friend down the hall and I both identify as feministcriminologists, we also identify as a range of other things: she is a straightwoman of colour, I am a queer, white woman. She grew up in small townNova Scotia, I in a large urban setting. She is childless by choice, I am aparent and so on. Although we both might lay claim to the constituencyof feminist criminology, we are also members of a range of other con-stituencies from which we also draw experiences, making the shaping ofa unified voice or the declaration of a spokesperson problematic.

Such criticisms, especially around voice and the privileging of white,middle-class female voices, are now familiar rebuttals to the second-wavefeminist movement overall. Called to account for lack of attention paid totheir experiences and a distinct shortage of space for their voices, womenmarginalized within the women’s movement began their own backlash ofsorts, responding to the second wave with a new movement in whichspaces are deliberately carved out for a wide range of feminisms that aredesigned to account for, or at least account for, the experiences of adiversity of women.

Postmodern feminism

The work of Michel Foucault is taken up by feminist scholars with particularinterest paid to Foucault’s ideas on power/knowledge. Despite the factthat Foucault (1979) himself rarely considered gender beyond its implicationsfor gay men’s sexuality, feminist criminologists turn to Foucault’s work asa means of trying to understand the networks of power and knowledgeinherent to the criminal justice system and its treatment of womenwithout being bound to an overarching feminist narrative of criminaljustice or any other social institution. Foucault’s analytic framework servesas a remedy of sorts to the problems revealed with standpoint. Instead ofdirecting the researcher to pay attention to oppressive gender relations,feminists taking up the postmodern lens are more inclined to start withpower relations, not patriarchy, as their point of inquiry. Hannah-Moffat(2001, 8) explains her position:

Patriarchy is not a useful analytical term, because it tends to focus our analysesof power on men’s oppression of women. It limits our ability to understandthe complexity of power relations as a given social site, and to examine powerrelations among women. Foucault’s understanding of power is that it is notsimply disciplinary or repressive.

Thus for Hannah-Moffat, Foucaultian methodology opens up the planesof inquiry, making apparent the array of power relations that might existin a governing site, importantly including those between women. Such arefocus allows Hannah-Moffat, in her own work, to give a thorough



account of the power relationships in a prison, illustrating, for example,that part of the power matrix of a prison exists within the role of theprison matron (historically).

Likewise, the focus on the apparatuses of power rather than thepatriarchy per se unveils layers of power relations that some suggest betterequip feminist inquiries to take account of other socio-structural consid-erations, including race and class. This is because postmodern traditionstake aim at truth claims rather than specific structures of oppression. Thegoal is to unsettle assumptions regarding the veracity of particular ways ofknowing crime. Hence, for example, in Moore and Valverde’s (2000, 514)study of date rape drugs, we destabilize claims about the dangers womenface by going out at night. We show that such claims are relative ratherthan absolute and have the effect of encouraging women to curb whatmight be seen as promiscuous sexual behaviours (like going out clubbing)rather than offering any coherent framework through which womenmight ensure their safety.

As with other forms of feminist thought, postmodern analytics are notwithout their detractors. For politically minded feminists, the concern isone of political action: if we no longer take patriarchy as our overarchingnarrative and point of resistance then how are we to organize, what arewe to resist? How will we bring about change? Such questions are posedmost recently by both Balfour (2006, 735) and Snider (2003, 354) in theirseparate considerations of the implications of postmodern feministscholarship in the incarceration spiral, a phenomena whereby we see anincrease in the criminalization and punishment of women.

At risk of conflating their distinct arguments, Balfour and Snider bothaccuse postmodern feminism of complicity in contemporary debatesabout women in conflict with the law. More scathingly, Snider ascribescomplicity to feminist criminologists (alongside a host of other roguish,critical criminological scholars) in the surge of punitiveness characteristicof contemporary discourses and practices of punishment. For Snider,criminology, as an institution of knowledge production, is responsible forconstituting knowledges about the woman in conflict with the law.Because all forms of criminological knowledge are constitutive they arealso, thereby, generative in penal schemes or, that is, participate in shapingthe contours of criminal justice.

Balfour, offering a perhaps more tempered but equally damning critique,suggests that the wedding of feminist criminological research withFoucaultian methods effects an alignment with the neoliberal state thatdisavows claims to structural inequality and social causation in attempts toexplain crime. Through this framework, Balfour contends, not only arethe important voices of women themselves abandoned (a move seen ascounter-intuitive to the feminist project) but also feminist thought itselfbecomes (and I realize this is a poor choice of language) impotent, unableto carry out any sort of political (and importantly) emancipatory agenda.



Feminist criminology today

Training our gaze on the current state of feminist criminology it is clearthat ‘we’ve come a long way, baby’. The inaugural issue of the journalFeminist Criminology was published in 2005 under the umbrella of theAmerican Society of Criminology. Feminist criminologists hold promi-nent positions within the field of criminology (Pat Carlen is the editor ofthe British Journal of Criminology) and feminist criminology appears to havecarved out a distinct space for itself within both mainstream and criticalcriminology.

Contemporary forms of feminist criminological inquiry draw on all thetraditions described above, in many instances combining two or three ofthem in order to push feminist scholarship into new areas of intellectualand political development. While tensions continue to be apparent withinthe field there are also, as Hemmings points out in her treatment offeminist theory more generally, many more points of commonality,particularly in the realm of politics, that draw feminist criminologiststogether than there are disagreements rending scholars.

Two such commonalities comes in the form of facing shared foes,co-optation and feminist backlash.

Co-optation

Feminist criminologists and political activists were behind a number ofchanges to criminal justice policy and practice effected over the last 30years. For the most part, these changes were read as initially progressive.The adoption of zero-tolerance laws towards domestic violence, for example,was at the outset seen as a triumph for women who were victims of abuse.It was assumed that zero-tolerance (a charging policy that means thateveryone accused of domestic violence is automatically charged by police)would mean that policing organizations would take domestic violencemore seriously and believe women who claimed they had been assaultedby their partners. At the other end of the spectrum, major changes in theimprisonment of women were initially embraced as moves towards recognizingthe different ways in which women experience imprisonment and therebycreating a penal system that is ‘woman centred’. In Canada, this meantthe closure of the infamous Prison for Women, replaced by five regionalwomen’s prisons that rejected ranges in favour of cottages, offeredprogramming tailored specifically to the needs of women in prison and tookinto account the reality of women’s lives, giving priority to initiatives suchas supporting women in maintaining their relationships with their children.

Despite their progressive packaging, many feminist criminologists, inhindsight, bemoan these initiatives as their effects run counter to thefeminist goals originally intended at their inception. For example, highrates of countercharging women is a maligned result of the zero-tolerance



policies concerning domestic violence. A near universal phenomena (andalso a result of equality-based legislation), jurisdictions that adoptedzero-tolerance extended the law to women as well. Often times womenreporting domestic violence found themselves charged with the crime astheir abusive partners claimed they too were the targets of violent attacks.

Likewise, moves to ‘feminize’ women’s imprisonment are now also thetopic of consternation among feminist criminologists who initiallychampioned the cause. The Canadian move to woman centred prisonswas the subject of a recent human rights complaint waged by the CanadianAssociation of Elizabeth Fry Societies. Among other things, the complaint(which was ultimately confirmed by the Human Rights Commission)suggested that the new scheme for incarcerating women continues todiscriminate against women by holding them at higher levels of securityand placing stricter restrictions on them than their criminal histories andinstitutional behaviours warrant. At the same time, the Correctional Serviceof Canada was accused of perpetuating particular discriminations againstAboriginal women in prison by using their near universal histories of traumaand abuse as criteria by which to allot them higher-risk designations.

Backlash

Alongside worries about feminist ideals being adopted and changed bygoverning authorities, feminist criminologists, with feminist scholars,must also occupy themselves with the problem of backlash. The notionof feminist backlash first emerged in the realm of popular culture in the1980s (Faludi 1991) when journalists began sounding the death knell ofthe women’s movement, arguing that feminism had done its job and wasnow largely irrelevant. The underlying assumption is that equality now existsbetween men and women, making gender-based politics and scholarshipbeside the point.

This form of backlash remains apparent in the academy and in feministcriminological work. Teaching feminism in the university is almostguaranteed to garner a degree of resistance from students in the form ofoutright hostility towards feminist ideas or, more commonly, widespreadapathy and disinterest on the part of both male and female students.

The enduring relevance of feminist scholarship and teaching in the fieldof criminology is apparent when we consider another, and arguably moreinsidious form of backlash. Under the current rise of neo-conservativepolitical regimes in the USA, Canada and the UK, major gains made inthe women’s movement are under threat if not already eliminated. Thisis the phenomena pointed to by Chesney-Lind (2006, 6), one of theforemost American criminologists, in her recent article on what she seesas a political crisis facing feminist criminology. Chesney-Lind points to anumber of developments over the last 20 years that do not bode particularlywell for feminist criminological projects.



Equality coming in the form of the masculinization of female offendersposes grave concern as popular representations of women in conflict withthe law place increased emphasis on the notion that women can be asviolent, depraved and predacious as men. Numerous examples are avail-able from media and popular culture, including emergent panics regardingwild, bad girls to depictions of women as serial killers (as in the case ofEileen Wournos in the USA and Karla Homolka in Canada) to hyper-sexualized representations of women in prison (Herman 2004, 141). Suchdepictions have not only served to fuel concerns that women are just asbad and dangerous and men but have also had the effect of undoing thework done by feminist criminologists to contextualize women’s violenceand ensure that women in conflict with the law are not held against amale standard.

Such concerns are even more acute in the wake of the rise of zero-tolerancepolicies described above. In this instance, backlash takes the form of netwidening as more and more women are dragged into the criminal justicesystem as their victimization is translated into criminalization.

Finally, many jurisdictions are experiencing the rise of what Chesney-Linddescribes as ‘vengeful equality’ in the realm of imprisonment. In thecontext of ‘tough on crime’ political agendas, women’s imprisonment inmany areas is becoming increasingly austere, moving further and furtherfrom the feminist ideal of woman centredness. In the US reports routinelysurface of women prisoners being shackled to beds as they give birth,boot camps are now used for women and prisons have abandoned thenotion that male guards ought not to participate in certain activities suchas strip searches and cross-gender supervision. In the province ofOntario, women-only institutions are eliminated in favour of mega-jailswith women’s wings. Women housed in detention centres face severeovercrowding and a total lack of programming.

Conclusion

Feminist criminology in its current state is a fertile intellectual ground.Theoretical innovations offer researchers a variety of analytic tools withwhich to explore not only the experiences of women in the criminaljustice system but also the broader intersections of gender and justice.These innovations inject gender into our understandings of crime and itscontrol, opening up new avenues of inquiry, including the study ofmasculinities as well as the intersection of gender and other socio-structuralconsiderations. At the same time, there is real cause for concern withrespect to the politics of women and criminal justice. At the samemoment in which feminist criminology finds itself void of coherency andan overarching political agenda, gains made under the feminist umbrellaare being eroded through the rise of right-wing politics. This particularpositioning of feminist criminology at this historical moment may be a



help or a hindrance, depending on one’s perspective. If, as Hemming(2005) suggests with regard to feminist theory, feminist criminologists arecontent to accept their intellectual difference while embracing theircommon ground (in this case regarding political threats) then perhaps thefeminist movement has reached a degree of maturity and stability that isable to support internal differences alongside more unified politicalalliances. In this sense, feminist criminology becomes less a tidy disciplinaryframework and more a fluid body of knowledge whose purveyors enjoyintellectual freedom and have the option of forming intellectual andpolitical movements as needed.

Short Biography

Dawn Moore is an interdisciplinary researcher whose work spans the fieldsof sociology, criminology and socio-legal studies. She is mainly interestedin questions of how the criminal justice system is used to govern certainpopulations and how, in turn, subjects of criminal justice-based governancenavigate their ways through the justice system. At present, Moore is inthe midst of a 3-year study looking substantively at the experiences ofwomen enrolled in Canadian drug treatment courts. Theoretically, thisproject is designed to forward feminist and post-structuralist thinking byoutlining first how criminal justice involvement constitutes a set of risksand harms for women. Second, the project is designed to consider howwomen themselves become managers of the risks they face, paying carefulattention to the technologies and practices they use to negotiate thesystem. This research builds on Moore’s previous work, including her researchon the rise of addiction treatment in the Canadian justice system (now abook with University of British Columbia Press entitled Criminal Artefacts),the governance of women’s sexuality through fear of ‘date rape drugs’(with Mariana Valverde), prisoner’s rights, prison privatization, drugregulation and rehabilitation. Moore has published widely including inTheoretical Criminology, Socio-Legal Studies, the British Journal of Criminologyand Economy and Society. She is currently an Assistant Professor in theDepartment of Law at Carleton University.

Notes

* Correspondence address: Department of Law, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Dr.,Ottawa, ON, Canada K1S 5B6. Email: [email protected]

1 Feminism is categorized by three ‘waves’ or historical movements. The first wave, loosely setin the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is most notably marked by women’s suffrage orsecuring the right to vote (among other legislative changes designed to promote women’sformal equality). Second-wave feminism (the 1960s and 1970s) is generally framed by women’sbids for both formal and substantive equality. Here issues such as reproductive rights, violenceagainst women, workplace discrimination and protections under family law were at the fore.Currently there is much suggestion that feminism has entered a third wave, a diverse movement



marked by a rejection of the universal notion of womanhood attributed to the second wave.Third wavers, among other things, claim the need to inject intersectionality into feministanalysis, recognizing that womanhood signifies different things to different constituencies. Assuch, the third wave does not embrace a unified political or intellectual agenda but rather isdesigned to carve out space for a variety of voices and viewpoints within feminist thought.2 The observations I make in this paper are intended to speak only to the situation of womenin the Anglophone global north.3 This term refers to the notion of patriarchy or the idea that the social world is organized insuch a way as to support the dominance of men over women.

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Feminist Criminology: Gain, Loss and Backlash

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