Abstract
It has often been remarked that the most significant fact about crime is that it is predominantly committed by men. Men, however, do not only stand out in crime statistics and make up the majority of prison populations, they also dominate the criminal justice system, the police and rehabilitation programmes. In order to understand the link between men, crime and the making of law and order, criminologists have since the 1990s increasingly turned their attention to the masculinity of crime. While criminology generally has experienced a ‘masculinity turn’ (Collier, 1998), the bulk of this research has been carried out by Anglo-American scholars and has focused primarily on Anglo-American contexts and realities. Against this background I really enjoyed reading Masculinities in the Criminological Field: Control, Vulnerability and Risk-Taking which the editors present as a Nordic anthology on masculinities, crime and control.
Masculinities in the Criminological Field is an anthology that combines a general criminological interest in crime and crime control with key Scandinavian theoretical discussions of masculinities. The editors of this collected volume identify key developments in the Nordic sociology on masculinity which they claim have exercised influence on Scandinavian criminological research on masculinity. Particularly, the editors draw attention to the fact that Scandinavian research on masculinity has undergone an important shift from mainly looking at hegemonic masculinities to investigating the borderlands between manliness and unmanliness and men’s experiences of the threat of being emasculated. While criminological research on masculinity traditionally has explored the interrelationship between crime and masculinity by use of Connell’s concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (1995), I find that one of the key contributions of Masculinities in the Criminological Field is the ambition to shift the attention to men’s experiences of masculinity challenges; to how men at times find it difficult to live up to norms of masculinity; and to how men’s attempts to manage threats to their masculine identities is entangled with symbolic and crime-related practices.
Masculinities in the Criminological Field is a dynamic compendium of 13 distinct essays (excluding the introduction). The contributors come from different disciplines such as criminology, gender studies, history, sociology and youth studies. While they originate from different disciplinary fields, the essays are well-integrated because most of them combine phenomenological/symbolic interactionist approaches with a post-structuralist discursive approach highlighting how gendered norms inform the enactment and negotiation of masculinities in correctional institutions or crime-related contexts.
The anthology is divided into three parts, each of them with a distinct focus. In the following I present a summary of the volume.
Part 1 ‘Negotiating Masculinities in Institutional Settings’ explores how different powerful institutions attempt to control and normalize ‘the other’ through the production of ‘appropriate’ masculinities. In this part Nina Jon’s essay (chapter 1) stands out particularly. Jon analyses how institutionalized conceptions of appropriate masculinity were central to the rehabilitation of delinquent boys in a Norwegian youth institution in the 1950s and 1960s. While it is not a new finding that ‘protest masculinity’ (Connell, 1995) or ‘cowboy masculinity’ (Jon’s term) is targeted and rendered problematic in (juvenile) correctional institutions, Jon elegantly highlights the paradox that correctional institutions at times unintentionally reinforce the very same problematic masculine performances that they initially try to alter. The paradoxical character of masculinity in correctional institutions is also the central theme in Tove Pettersson’s essay (chapter 2). In her essay Pettersson explores how staff members in Swedish youth institutions express ambivalence towards male colleagues’ physical appearance and performance of hyper-masculinity which is both seen as necessary but also believed to have potential negative influences on delinquent boys’ performance of masculinity. Combined the essays in Part 1 convincingly demonstrate how ‘appropriate’ masculinity varies across the different institutional settings, but also how institutions are characterized by competing and contradictory norms of ‘appropriate’ masculinity, a point which is also reflected in Ingrid Landers essay (chapter 4) on current transformations and gender complexities within the Swedish police.
Part 2 ‘Vulnerable Masculinities’ focuses on cases where men are victimized and how men (re-)construct masculinity when they are under threat. While Thomas Ugelvik’s essay (chapter 3, Part 1) explores how prison institutions threaten to emasculate male inmates and how these seek to re-position themselves as masculine by honoring an ‘inmate code’ against snitching, the essays in Part 2 investigate how men’s masculine identities are challenged by being victimized either concretely or symbolically. In her essay Veronika Burcar (chapter 6) analyses how young Swedish men, who have been the victims of violent assaults or muggings, in narrative retelling of episodes, modify the victim category from a passive to an active position, thereby (re-)constructing themselves as rational, responsible and competent victims, i.e. as masculine victims. By exploring how victims come to recognize themselves as victims or negotiate the victim position, Burcar’s essay speaks to what has been referred to as ‘cultural victimology’. Päivi Honkatukia and Leena Suurpää (chapter 7) investigate how young men of ethnic minority backgrounds, in Sweden, construct ‘armoured toughness’ in response to experiences of being ‘victims’ of everyday racism. Honkatukia and Suurpää’s approach resembles existing research on how marginalized young men culturally manage and resist experiences of marginalization, but the authors also claim to contribute to the existing literature by highlighting the flexibility and active disengagement from ‘tough masculinity’ characterizing these young men’s constructing of masculine identities. Although Honkatukia and Suurpää are right in claiming that studies of male youth street cultures and crime tend to give priority to the analysis of ‘tough’ street identities, the essay could have benefitted from a more active engagement with contemporary work on the interrelationship between correctional reformation, desistance and processes of identity changes. As such it does not seem to be an insignificant detail that some (or maybe many) of Honkatukia and Suurpää’s informants were clients in correctional treatment programmes (p. 134), yet the authors pay little attention to how informants’ active interpretation of their own lives takes place in particular contexts and life situations. The two final essays in Part 2 take very different approaches to the interrelationship between masculinity and victimization. Marie Bruvik Heinskou (chapter 8) describes how generalized stereotypes about the dangerous and hyper-masculine black man render ethnic minority men potential victims of false rape accusations in Denmark. Annette Bringedal Houge (chapter 9) explores how humiliation and emasculinization of the ethnic ‘other’ was part of war violence in former Yugoslavia. Based on the assumption that men at times demonstrate masculinity by reducing the relative masculinity of others, Houge describes how male perpetrators of war crimes at times forced male prisoners to take part in their own victimization process by being forced to abuse other male prisoners sexually. Houge’s essay in this way contributes to the study of gendered war crimes, traditionally dominated by a focus on the sexual victimization of women.
Part 3 of the anthology ‘On the Edge of Control: Risk Taking and Masculinities’ focuses on voluntary risk-taking and the balance between control and loss of control. Traditionally, studies on marginalized men, crime and masculinity have often drawn their theoretical inspiration from the Birmingham school and used concepts such as ‘opposition’ and ‘resistance’ in their analysis. The essays in Part 3 instead draw their inspiration from sociological studies of voluntary risk-taking and edgework. The consequence is a shift in focus from the structural conditions of crime, class and resistance to a focus on individuals’ lifeworlds, voluntary risk-taking, criminality and excitement-seeking in individualized western consumer societies. Based on an ethnographic study in Sweden, Dag Balkmar and Tanja Joelsson (chapter 10) explore how young men engage in the thrills of street racing to challenge notions of their rural community as boring, but also how the demonstration of control over the vehicle in street racing becomes a way for the young men to construct a masculine sense of self as courageous, skillful and funny. Similar to the project of cultural and narrative criminology, explorations of localized risk cultures in this way seem to enable perspectives on how individuals make criminal activities meaningful and to highlight the seductive and experiential aspects of criminal activities. In line with this, Simon Simonsen (chapter 11) uses a narrative approach to analyse how male poker players compare illegal poker gambling to physical fighting and how notions of competitiveness and self-control are central to the young gamblers’ construction of poker as a form of virtuous masculine fighting. While maintaining a focus on risk-taking, Sidsel Kirstine Harder and Signe Ravn’s essay differs from the remainder of the book by focusing mainly on young women instead of men, thereby underlining that masculinities are not necessarily tied to the male body. By analysing how drug using women incorporate markers of masculinity in their gender club performances, Harder and Ravn’s essay represents an original approach to illegal drug consumption. Similar to the critique of Halberstam’s notion ‘female masculinities’ (1998), Harder and Ravn’s analysis, however, also runs the risk of unintendedly treating masculinity as a rather fixed concept associated with particular ‘traits’ attributed to dominant males. The anthology ends with Lotta Pettersson and Christoffer Carlsson’s essay (chapter 13) on elderly men’s drug use persistence and desistance. Rather than treating gender as a variable, as has often been the case in many life course studies on crime, Pettersson and Carlsson’s essay gives special attention to the links between sexuality, the processes of aging and (un-)masculinity and elderly men’s drug persistence/desistance.
Overall, Masculinities in the Criminological Field is a well-written and insightful anthology that makes important contributions to the study of the crime-masculinity-control nexus. The strength of the anthology is that it applies an interdisciplinary approach to shed light on the gendered aspects of unconventional criminological research topics such as car racing, gambling, drug use and war crimes. Furthermore I believe that the anthology has much to offer both to practitioners and academics. With regard to the former, especially the essays in Part 1, describing gender paradoxes in institutional rehabilitation, raise important questions about how subtle and unrecognized institutionalized gendered norms might influence or even undermine the effectiveness of rehabilitation programmes. The anthology also set the way for future criminological research on crime and masculinity by highlighting a focus on ‘vulnerable masculinities’.
The anthology however also has certain limitations. While the concept ‘vulnerable masculinities’ seems to promise much analytical value it remains undefined. Furthermore, in the actual analysis masculinity challenges and vulnerabilities too often remain or are reduced to a mere context – as in a situational or structural crisis of masculinity – against which the authors can elaborate on men’s demonstration of masculinity. I am convinced that the book could have made a larger contribution to the existing criminological research on masculinity, if the authors had given more explicit attention to the phenomenological experiences of gendered or gender vulnerabilities. A further limitation of the book is related to the engagement with the exiting research and the definition of the criminological field. While the editors advocate a broad definition of the criminological field in their selection of contributors and contributions, they at the same time seem to operate with a rather narrow definition of the criminological field when arguing that fairly limited criminological research exists on crime and masculinity (p. 3). This of course is not merely a question of definitions, it also relates to more important questions such as engagement with the existing literature. Too often I have the impression that some of the authors seem satisfied with qualifying the relevance of their contribution by making the argument ‘not much research exists on … .’, instead of actively engaging with the research (strictly criminological or not) that does exist on their topic. In spite of these limitations I find Masculinities in the Criminological Field to be highly recommendable reading for scholars, students and practitioners.