Introduction: queer(y)ing justice

The lives of sexuality- and gender-diverse people around the world have, in recent years, changed dramatically. In some regions, political campaigns for social, criminal, and legal justice have been characterised by increasing visibility and popular support, coupled with the removal of social inequalities and discrimination. However, in other regions, repression and discrimination have remained stable or even increased, and social gains have been promptly followed by conservative backlash. After the achievement of marriage equality, for example, this backlash took the form of a Religious Freedom Review, which has sought to protect the religious ‘freedom’ to discriminate against sexuality- and gender-diverse people. In the United States of America, too, the Supreme Court decision on marriage equality was followed, not too long afterwards, with a ban on transgender people entering the military among other indicators of reducing acceptance of sexuality and gender diversity (GLAAD 2018). The field of Queer Criminology has recently emerged – led by scholars in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia – as a way of enhancing and evaluating efforts to address the inequalities and discrimination faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people in the criminal justice context (Buist and Lenning 2016; Peterson and Panfil 2014; Dwyer, Ball, and Crofts 2016). In a short period of time this field has grown significantly, drawing together a previously disparate set of critical studies in attempts to illuminate aspects of the criminal justice experience for LGBTQ people, and to correct criminology’s historical assumption that LGBTQ people – if, in fact, it even considered them at all – were inherently deviant. This rapid growth of queer criminological research has seen the field develop in many directions, such that it not only includes an ever-expanding array of empirical studies into policing (Dwyer 2015; Miles-Johnson 2013; Colvin 2012), imprisonment (Simpson et al. 2016), and crime victimisation (Asquith and Fox 2016), but also includes important theoretical developments debating issues such as the most productive directions for the field, or how ‘queer’ might be defined and used in criminology (Ball 2016)