Masculinities, structure and hegemony

Criminologists consistently have advanced biological sex as the strongest predictor of criminal involvement: it explains more variance in crime cross-culturally than any other variable. As an explanatory factor, then, more developed accounts of gender as the social and cultural differences between men and women – rather than mere bodily difference – would seem to be critical. Yet early theoretical works in the sociology of crime were gender-blind. That is, although acknowledging that the vast majority of those who commit crime were men and boys, the gendered content of their legitimate and illegitimate behaviours was virtually ignored (Messerschmidt 1993). The rise of second-wave feminism – originating in the 1960s – challenged this masculinist nature of criminology by illuminating the patterns of gendered power that had been all but ignored. As a result of feminism, not only is the importance of gender to understanding crime more broadly acknowledged but it has also led to the critical study of masculinity and crime (see Messerschmidt and Tomsen 2015). The major theoretical perspective in this endeavour is James W. Messerschmidt’s (2014) structured-action theory