Feminist criminologies

In 1968 Frances Heidensohn (1968:171) described the study of gender, women and deviance ‘as lonely uncharted seas of human behaviour’ and in 2012 ’as one of the most robust, resilient and important features of modern criminology’ (Heidensohn, 2012:132). Today there are journals dedicated to publishing feminist scholarship in criminology including, Feminist Criminology, Violence Against Women, The Australian Feminist Law Journal, Gender and Violence and Women and Criminal Justice. A number of Handbooks, such as Routledge International Handbook of Crime and Gender Studies (2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Sex, Gender and Crime (2014), have also appeared in print. This is a solid indication of the success, depth and breadth of research on gender, crime and criminal justice – a success ‘unimaginable fifty years ago’ (McCarthy and Gartner, 2014:15). Not all this work is feminist however. Feminist research focuses on how offending, victimisation and social and institutional responses to crime are ‘fundamentally gendered’ (Renzetti, 2013:13) – at the level of social organisation, social action and subjective agency. This chapter takes stock of key developments in feminist criminologies over the last fifty to sixty years. Importantly there was and still is no single identifiable feminist approach to theorising or researching gender and crime (Gelsthorpe, 1990:90)..