Critical perspectives on intersectionality and criminology: Introduction

Criminologists have long been interested in the relationship between crime with race, gender, and class, exploring how the latter set of factors shape or determine differences in offending, victimization, case processing, and outcomes (Daly 1989; Daly and Tonry, 1997; Peterson et al., 2006; Rosich, 2007; Sampson and Laub, 1993; Tonry, 2011). The resulting work addresses disparities in various phases of the judicial process (e.g. arrest, adjudication, sentencing, and parole) and pathways into offending and victimization (Chesney-Lind, 1989; Huebner and Bynum, 2008; Spohn and Sample, 2013). Yet while much conventional criminological research does incorporate race, class, and gender in some ways, very few have theorized about the intersections of those factors and crime in substantive ways.

This special section aims to fill that gap in criminological theory by exploring contemporary views of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991). These essays seek to inform and provoke criminologists to engage more critically in how the justice system embodies, perpetuates, and transforms existing social inequalities such as race, class, and gender. The call to take an intersectional approach is more than just an intellectual exercise: it is literally a matter of life and death apparent in the police killings of Black men and women in the USA, racial disparities in death penalty outcomes, and deaths resulting from transnational migration into Europe and the USA.

Before introducing the essays in this section, I provide a brief overview of intersectionality. Some cite Patricia Hills Collins’ work and the long tradition of Black feminist scholars and social activists’ work around race, class, and gender as the antecedent to it (Collins, 2015; Potter, 2015). Building on that work which took place within and beyond the academy, critical legal scholar Kimberlee Crenshaw (1989, 1991) introduced and expanded upon the term, “intersectionality” to those situated in the academy. In her essays, Crenshaw argues that experiences and lives cannot be separated into distinct identities of race, class, and gender. Rather, those identities overlap, crossing over into one another in various ways, depending on the context and situation. Any analysis of crime that looks at racial, class, or gender disparities should take account of those intersecting identities.

Crenshaw (1991) conducts such an analysis of rape and domestic violence as they pertain to women of color, breaking down the concept of intersectionality along structural, political, and representational lines. Structural intersectionality, she argues, recognizes the positions of women of color in lower social strata that put them more at risk for these forms of violence compared to White women; examples include previous immigration laws that compelled immigrant women to stay married to their citizen husbands for two years to obtain residency status or language barriers preventing women of color from accessing social services for victims of domestic violence or rape. Political intersectionality addresses the discourses embedded in the laws, policies, and social services related to domestic violence and rape that effectively silence or erase the experiences of women of color by either (1) invoking the White woman’s experiences as victims to “normalize” the idea of these forms of violence or (2) suggesting the need to focus instead on the fight against racism (e.g. minority women must stand together with minority men who are being unfairly treated by the justice system, given how laws perpetuate the discourses of White women victimized by minority men). Finally, representational intersectionality analyzes the broader cultural discourses to show how “contemporary critiques of racist and sexist representations marginalize women of color” (1991: 1282). To exemplify this idea of representational intersectionality, Crenshaw uses the obscenity case against two Black male rappers of 2 Live Crew to argue that the criticism toward their misogynistic lyrics about Black women was (1) overly harsh given the lack of attention paid to more explicitly misogynistic messages contained in White entertainers’ performances and (2) not really about expressing concern for women of color but rather, more about perpetuating the image of the violent Black male sexual predator.

Based on Crenshaw’s work as well as the others before her, intersectionality has informed and inspired research in a wide swath of disciplines such as law, public health, history, cultural studies, and ethnic studies (Cho et al., 2013; Collins, 2015). In socio-legal studies, authors like Caldwell (1991) and Han (2008) analyze laws as narratives to reveal the intersections of racialized, gendered, and class discourses encoded in the texts. Some, like Delgado and Stefancic (2012) promote the idea of “legal storytelling” that gives voice to the silenced who were not previously able to talk about their experiences. This type of storytelling (or counterstorytelling), they write, is a way to “challenge, displace, or mock these pernicious racist narratives and beliefs” (Delgado and Stefancic, 2012: 49). As part of that endeavor, some critical race theorists such as Patricia Williams (1991) discuss their own personal experiences as marginalized people of color to highlight the ways they have been rendered absent or invisible by laws or legal debates that the dominant group would not have been able to easily grasp.

As the scholarship on intersectionality broadens, some have questioned the term’s definition. In two recent review articles, Cho et al. (2013) and Collins (2015) explore both of those issues. For Collins (2015: 2) intersectionality is “the critical insight that race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but as reciprocally constructing phenomena that in turn shape complex social inequalities”. For Cho et al., matters are subtler. They write (2013: 795):

What makes an analysis intersectional—whatever terms it deploys, whatever its iteration, whatever its field or discipline—is its adoption of an intersectional way of thinking about the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to power. This framing—conceiving of categories not as distinct but as always permeated by other categories, fluid and changing, always in the process of creating and being created by dynamics of power—emphasizes what intersectionality does rather than what intersectionality is.

Both approaches re-emphasize that structural inequalities and power relationships shape which combination of identities matter in what particular contexts. In so doing, they address the critiques of intersectionality research that say it mistakenly treats each identity as distinct (thus creating an “additive” effect of each identity); does not discern which identities need to be included in that particular analysis (creating the “etcetera” problem of having a seemingly endless supply of variables); or views identity as static and fixed. ¹

Most of the criminological work on intersectionality and crime has sought to understand how the lived experiences of offenders and victims complicate analyses focusing just on race, class, gender, place, or sexuality. For example, Elijah Anderson’s (1999) work is often cited for its nuanced understanding of race, class, gender, and place as it pertains to violence in poor black urban neighborhoods. Anderson contextualized this violence by showing how the areas in which many of these offenders live are fraught with economic disadvantage, racial discrimination, and mistrust in the police’s ability to serve and protect them. Young Black men enact the “code on the street” in reaction to the societal alienation caused by those structural factors in which their only way to express their masculinity is through the potential to engage in violence if so provoked. Taking a feminist approach to similar neighborhoods, Jones (2009) and Miller (2008) each address how the same factors affect girls’ patterns of violence differently. As De Coster and Heimer (2006) note elsewhere, these analyses look at differences across and within social groups to obtain a more precise understanding of how those group identities are related to crime and crime patterns. More recently, Crenshaw and Ritchie (2015) issued a report demonstrating how the focus on Black men in common media representations of police brutality skew our view of the scope of the problem, as there have been a significant number of incidents of police brutality against Black women. In addition to calling attention to the similarities of both Black men and women’s experiences, Crenshaw and Ritchie’s (2015: 1) intersectional approach also highlights the uniqueness in police violence against Black women that is specific to their “race, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation”. They compellingly document how police violence against Black women can occur when police respond to incidents of domestic disturbances and that the form of that violence could include sexual harassment and assault.

The specific challenge for many criminologists remains in applying methods that preclude the explicit analyses of race, class, and gender called for by an intersectionality approach. Indeed, Crenshaw’s original second frame of intersectionality—politicization—includes an extended section on how social science research such as criminology reinforces those politicized views of crime. That is, positivist methods based on crime statistics such as arrest rates, prison admissions, or sentence lengths unintentionally or unwittingly reinforce “realities” of crime that are based on broader societal patterns of racial, gender, and class discrimination. This is not to say that the crimes represented by the statistics did not occur—but rather, that other potential criminal acts go unnoticed and thus are absent from any empirical analyses about criminal offending or victimization patterns.

So where does that leave criminological research that does rely on such empirical data? For quantitative researchers who measure the interaction effect of race-class or gender-race in their analyses, how would they measure the effect of the intersections of those factors if the meaning and salience of these intersections fluctuate over time and context? While qualitative methods are better suited to address the meanings of those intersectional identities, they raise other challenges. For instance, what happens when the samples are not large enough to make substantive comparisons of those intersections? Or, for ethnographic work, what happens when the people being observed (e.g. justice actors) do not themselves see those identities as relevant?

In my ethnographic research on juvenile court decision-making processes (Paik, 2011), for instance, I noticed race, class, and gender divisions in how judges and other justice actors described the youths. They discussed minorities as troubled irresponsible delinquents deserving punishment versus Whites as mentally ill in need of treatment. Girls’ risky behavior—as indicated by parents and validated by the staff—was related to their sexual activities versus boys’ risky behavior which was defined more based on their delinquent or drug-using acts. Poor parents also were seen as being unable to supervise their youths versus middle-class parents who advocated strongly for their youths. At the same time, the staff did not consistently invoke or apply these coded descriptions in their decision-making practices, making it difficult to craft any explicit racial disparity argument. For example, I had to remove such an analysis from an earlier version of an article about staff uses of mental health diagnoses (Paik, 2009), after the reviewers questioned if I was simply “looking for race” in my data. Moreover, while the justice actors—many of whom were people of color themselves—might have acknowledged generally those racial, class, or gendered divisions, they did not articulate them as informing specific decisions about individual youths. So to put it bluntly, how does a researcher qualitatively observe the institutional racism, sexism, and classism operating in individual cases, given the small samples and often “hidden” character to the institutionalized discrimination?

These questions raise others about the possible theoretical incompatibilities between intersectionality and criminology. Intersectionality scholars suggest looking at race, class, and gender in terms of identities, rather than as fixed demographic characteristics, to assess how the justice system discriminates in ways that are both seen and unseen. Yet how might we measure those identities regarding what specific outcomes? How might perceptions of offenders, justice actors, and researchers complicate how those identities are defined and measured? For example, consider if a person identifies as “Caribbean” versus “Black”. Do we collapse Caribbean into the Black category if the justice system classifies them as such? Finally, how do we incorporate the systemic forms of discrimination into these analyses based on data of individual cases where the various intersections affect the cases differently at various points? ²

It is those theoretical and empirical challenges of intersectionality that this special section seeks to address. The essays all consider in their own way the following specific questions: is intersectionality a theory, a method, or more of a lens through which to critically view our work? How does intersectionality inform justice policy, if at all? How would it be used to study various aspects of criminal justice processing or to various groups in society beyond the conventional ideas of race, class, and gender? How might it be relevant in studying new identity-based groups that are emerging as prominent (e.g. transgender) or sexualities in criminological research?

The four essays address these questions for different populations of offenders and victims in various domestic and international contexts. De Coster and Heimer update their 2006 work that addressed differences in criminal offending patterns across and within gender (as intersecting with race and class). Their intent in this new essay is to move beyond gender to include issues of sexuality as well, discussing how LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) offenders are often motivated to commit violence as a protective mechanism of their racial and gendered identities.

The next two essays look at the intersections of race and gender as they affect people’s interactions and experiences with policing in two different contexts: the USA and the UK. Owusu-Bempah’s essay addresses how broader racial discourses are reflected, perpetuated, and transformed in the US criminal justice system, particularly regarding African American male offending and interactions with police. While it is not using intersectionality in the conventional sense, this essay shows how intersectionality’s tenets can be used to incorporate a more historical and critical view of race in our research for a better understanding of both the structural historical reasons for African American male offending and the racial disparities within the criminal justice system. Crossing the Atlantic, Parmar discusses how mainstream British criminological research has appropriated intersectionality to dilute the analytical focus on race by looking instead at ethnicity, with the unintended consequence of allowing neoliberal policies that still rely on race and racism to continue unchecked or unchallenged. Parmar argues forcefully for breaking that silence on race, using a more nuanced intersectional approach in her research on Asian Muslim men’s experiences with police in the UK to reveal how certain minorities become invisible in the generalized category of “Blackness” typically used in British criminological research.

The final essay expands upon Parmar’s critique of initial uses of intersectionality in British criminology to consider the possibilities and limitations of intersectionality as it pertains to transnational groups. Sanchez picks up where Henne and Troshynski (2013) left off in their critique of intersectionality as “fixing” identities of race, class, and gender in ways that do not apply to transnational migration or consider the historical legacies of colonization, imperialism, and globalization. Like Owusu-Bempah’s essay, Sanchez reiterates the importance of situating any analysis of crime within the broader historical, structural, and cultural context shaping both the offenders’ and victims’ actions and decisions, so as to not overly attribute responsibility to individuals nor reify categories of race, gender, and class as driving those individuals’ choices.

Taken individually and as a whole, the articles in this special section represent contemporary views of intersectionality across various historical, societal, national, and international contexts. They show how intersectionality allows us to avoid overly deterministic structural analyses while also not assuming individuals operate independently of that structural context. These essays also challenge and provide ideas for criminologists to use an intersectionality approach more explicitly in their work. To that end, we have solicited book reviews over the past year (Crutchfeld, 2014; Sanchez, 2014) and in this issue (Dubrofsky and Magnet, 2015; Potter, 2015) to provide even more examples of how to incorporate intersectionality into criminological research. The imperative of this approach lies in seeing the criminal justice system’s potential to and history of exacerbating social inequalities. It is our contention that to not consider how that process works is, in and of itself, criminal.