Crime,Media,Culture: An International Journal

Just as the political divisions in the North of Ireland are subject to ongoing critique, so too is its culture that maintains what scholars recognize as contested heritage. Ethno-political symbols, such as flags and murals, not only point to certain identities but also mark their territory. Whereas those emblems have been the subject of extensive research, political posters remain an overlooked source of rich iconography. This article fills that void by examining a collection of posters on display at the Irish Republican History Museum in West Belfast. The posters, in their original incarnation, emboldened the streetscapes of urban zones during “the Troubles”—a euphemism used to depict sectarian violence from the 1960s to the 1990s. In their afterlife, those posters have been preserved as material artefacts consumed by political tourists interested in gaining insight into the dissonance of heritage. Semiotics—the study of signs—provides a theoretical paradigm for this interpretation of the posters and their meaning. Moreover, Juri Lotman’s notion of the semiosphere (semiotic space) adds a deeper layer of analysis by directing critical attention to the role of the boundary where the performance of signs is most intense.

This article examines the attempts of ‘spyware’ developers to commodify and market their products to a general audience. While consumers of ‘spyware’ have often been government and law enforcement (Citizen Lab, 2015), there is an increasing attempt to market, sell, and commodify ‘spyware’ for use by wider audiences. ‘Spyware’ is sold as a security product commonly aimed at businesses, parents, and intimate partners. Pursuant to calls for a “sociology of security consumption” (Goold et al., 2010: 3), this article analyzes how nine prominent spyware vendors attribute meaning to their products. Spyware vendors face particularly fraught marketing challenges as the general deployment of spyware: a) is often utilized in forms of intimate partner abuse; b) is “morally troubling” from the perspective of being corrosive to many forms of social relations (Loader et al., 2014: 469); and c) has limited contexts where it could be deployed without violating surveillance laws. More specifically, this article compares the social meaning that vendors attempt to give to spyware and contrasts this with the powers of surveillance provided by the product, the marketing messages that appear to support non-consensual use, and the lack of guidance for non-consenting spyware targets to have recourse with the vendors.

Dramatized depictions of female on male rape, in inverting the conventional gendered rape binary of male assailant/female victim, are commonly regarded as subverting gender norms, and are thus celebrated as pro-feminist. I present a Foucauldian problematization of this rationale – arguing that, through a process of over-writing gender, inversion of the norm masks a ‘reversion to the norm’. To interpret this as pro-feminist, one must be distracted by corporeal gender in the superficial role reversal, and blind to the anti-feminist effects in operation. Critical discourse analysis of an example drawn from the popular US television show American Horror Story illustrates that such depictions operate in discursive space as the locus for a process of ‘governmentalized recursion’. A close reading of the media text and its audience reception is performed, methodological considerations in the intersection of feminist analyses and cultural criminology vis a vis gendered lacunae and popular misinterpretation are discussed and the primacy of scenographic analysis is challenged via a focus on ‘the arc’. This article thus contributes an intervention in the discourse predicated on a Foucauldian triangulation of media texts, audience responses and institutional frameworks and practices, to comprise a history of the present in a controversial and neglected area.

Popular documentary representations of crime and punishment have traditionally tended to fall into two camps: programs that are critical of law enforcement agencies and those that are sympathetic to them. In this article, we show how programs that present themselves as critical of legal authorities can nonetheless reinforce the “law and order punitivism” that underlay the ratcheting up of harsh punishment in the late 20th century. In a case study of the popular documentary miniseries Making a Murderer, we show how this can happen when texts fetishize the question of a criminal defendant’s innocence, adopt a “good versus evil” approach to players in the criminal justice system, and perpetuate a procedural rather than substantive vision of justice. Arguments are supported by a close reading of Making a Murderer and illustrated by a line of discussion it inspired in an internet forum.

Following the 2016 general ban on new psychoactive substances, synthetic cannabinoids (‘spice’-type drugs) have moved into unregulated street markets and have become popular among homeless populations in the United Kingdom. Images of so-called ‘spice zombies’, rough sleepers in public spaces experiencing severe substance-induced fits, have been used by local and national media to suggest the growing scale of the problem. This article proposes that such depictions should be read through a cultural analysis rooted in the political economy of austerity policies, where the twofold stigma of substance and welfare dependencies directs guilt at the poor, concealing the systemic cruelty of benefits reforms. Through the circulation of such tropes and the ridiculing of a superfluous abject underclass that embodies them, media and political discourses of the ‘broken society’ highlight an evident need for welfare reduction and more generally for the austerity project.

Drawing on a social constructionist paradigm, this article critically examines mass-mediated framing of the issue of child sexual exploitation online and via mobile communications technology. The Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P),¹ a non-profit charity located in Winnipeg, Canada, is used as a case study of claims-making and the social construction of the social problem of child sexual exploitation online. The present study focuses on media engagement by C3P and its subsidiary CyberTip—Canada’s national internet tip line—between 2000 and 2011, just prior to CyberTip receiving legislative designation as Canada’s official reporting agency. The analysis draws on news media accounts of claims-making activities of C3P in three local and national Canadian newspapers. By focusing on the rhetoric of claims forwarded by the organization, I argue that C3P has been successful in gaining symbolic ownership of the issue and has been instrumental in defining the nature, extent, and appropriate responses to the problem of online child sexual exploitation in Canada. I conclude by considering the broader implications for criminal justice policy and practice.

This article returns to Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish in order to consider its continued relevance for thinking about the representation of incarceration today beyond categories of ‘spectacle’ and ‘surveillance’. In order to rethink the text in relation to contemporary scholarship on visual criminology, it will explore the visual elements of Discipline and Punish in more detail via the concepts of the ‘tableau’ and the ‘diagram’ found in Gilles Deleuze’s Foucault. These concepts will be supplemented by the notion of the ‘calligram’, drawing on Foucault’s 1968 essay ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ in order to explore what is at stake in current representations of incarceration via a specific engagement with offender art. Evoking Jacques Rancière’s notion of curiosity as a critique of the ‘intolerable image’, the article will suggest ways in which the relationship between the academic scholar qua ‘penal spectator’ and the ‘represented’ incarcerated subject can be reconfigured to produce a more critical, empathetic and socially responsible engagement with such representations.