Cultrual Criminology and Gender Consciousness:

Moving Feminist Theory From Margin to Center

Laura Naegler and Sara Salman

Feminist Criminology, 2016, 11(4), 354-374

Abstract
Cultural criminology emerged in the mid-nineties with defining texts
written by Jock Young, Keith Hayward, and Jeff Ferrell, among others.
Since its inception, it has been criticized for its shallow connections with
feminist theory. While in theory cultural criminology clearly
acknowledges the influence of feminist scholarship, it has in practice
often only superficially ‘added’ on gender and sexuality to its scholarly
investigations. Yet, as we argue, research identified with cultural
criminology has much to gain from feminist theory. This article reviews
a range of cultural criminological scholarship, particularly studies of
subcultures, edgework, and terrorism. We investigate three themes
significant for feminist research: masculinities and femininities, sexual
attraction and sexualities, and intersectionality. Such themes, if better
incorporated, would strengthen cultural criminology by increasing the
explanatory power of resulting analyses. We conclude by advocating that
feminist ideas be routinely integrated into cultural criminological
research.

Keywords
cultural criminology, feminist criminology, feminist criminology
scholarship, gender and sexuality, edgework, terrorism

One of the main criticisms of cultural criminology, persistent since its

inception, is that this perspective pays insufficient analytical attention to
the politics of gender. In response, founders of the field have noted that
cultural criminology has much in common with feminist criminology
(Ferrell, Hayward, & Young, 2015; Hayward, 2016). Cultural
criminologists also refer to the strong impact of feminist methodologies
on the methods of cultural criminology, including the notion of
criminological verstehen (Kane, 1998). But while clearly acknowledging
the influence of feminist scholarship, gender often seems too
superficially “added on” to cultural criminology, a perspective
intellectually inspired more passionately elsewhere as it unfolded from
the 1990s through the present. If so, what can be learned post facto from
feminist theory that can constructively add to the theoretical reach of this
criminological “cultural turn”? How can we move gender analysis from
margin to center, a phrase that borrows from bell hooks’s (1984) well-
known critique of racism’s marginalization over the course of theorizing
gender?
In this article, we begin with an overview of why gender matters more
for cultural criminology than has usually been acknowledged. We review
cultural criminological work, focusing on research that engages with
feminist theory and on case studies of varied subcultures, edgework, and
terrorism. We identify three themes—the study of masculinities and
femininities, sexuality, and intersectionality—which, if better
incorporated, would strengthen cultural criminology and increase the
explanatory power of resulting analyses. Finally, we conclude by
discussing the implications of this analysis for the future of cultural
criminology and the study of gender within criminology overall.

Why Gender Matters

The rise of cultural criminology occurred through the 1990s when in
sociology—with which criminology in the U.S. academy is closely
intertwined—a cultural turn was likewise for years afoot. Culture had
become hugely significant for French theorists from Foucault to Bourdieu,
Lacan, and Derrida; in the United States, the culture section of the
American Sociological Association (ASA) grew to be one of the largest
within the organization. Culture, of course, mediates between agencies and
structures, and its association with a wide range of practices and
institutions of everyday life—neighborhood and communities, media,
religion, ethnic and racial group affiliations, language, customs—was
plumbed both for its own significance and for its complex influence on the
reproduction of neoliberalizing global capitalism. Within criminology, the
publication of Jack Katz’s (1988) The Seductions of Crime was one
incarnation of this broader cultural turn. Katz’s now-classic work
introduced “foreground” factors that have been relatively ignored in favor
of “background” structural analyses, brilliantly focusing on the roles of
emotions and phenomenological immediacy and contingency to illuminate
why “criminal/ized” events may (or may not) occur.
Katz’s work similarly influenced the interdisciplinary orientation of
cultural criminology. Since the perspective’s inception in 1995 with
Ferrell and Sanders’s Cultural Criminology, it has focused on the cultural
meanings of practices defined as “crime” and the cultural dynamics of
criminalization and control for the late modern condition. Here, culture
is understood as the “symbolic environment” (Ferrell et al., 2015, p. 3) in
and through which individuals and groups make sense of their being, their
actions, and the social and material world. “Culture” is inextricably
intertwined with structures of power and shaped by existing patterns of
inequality, but it is not seen as a static entity reducible to class, ethnicity,
or territory. Rather, for cultural criminologists, culture is dynamic. A
complex interplay of transgression, criminalization, and control lies at the
core of the continuous and often paradoxical processes by which meaning
and identities are negotiated and generated. “Crime” is not simply the act
of deviating from a social norm, but relates to a wide assortment of
institutions that engage in the production and circulation of cultural
meanings that shape perceptions of crime. Consequently, transgression
and crime are social products meaningful within the specific cultural
dynamics surrounding them and “must be read in terms of the meanings
they carry” (Hayward & Young, 2004, p. 259).
Following this perspective on crime and culture, cultural criminology
emphasizes human agency and the distinctive creativity of human action
and practices. Moreover, crucial for cultural criminology, human actions
and experiences have to be understood in the context of economic
globalization, the rise of neoliberal ideologies, and increasing economic
insecurity. As Young (1999) argues with his concept of the bulimic
society (see also Brotherton & Naegler, 2014), these features of late
modernity incessantly create new categories of inclusion and exclusion.
Widespread experiences of “ontological insecurity” pervade late
modernity; individuals are disembedded from biography, and
discontinuities of individual narratives result (Young, 2007).
Then too, in Young’s understanding of culture, social conditions
cannot be seen as deterministic nor human actions entirely determined by
structures (Young, 2007). Rather, collective meaning is generated
through fluid interactive processes; connotations, definitions, rules, and
values are constantly negotiated and can be maintained and enforced as
well as discarded, reshaped, or resisted (see also Salman, 2014).
Furthermore, people cope in multiple ways with emotions evoked by
intensified conditions of insecurity and seemingly endless, spiraling
social changes; they find and invent new ways to reassert identity
(Hayward, 2004). Thus, a richly diverse and creative set of human
practices confirm the centrality of culture for understanding both social
life in general and crime in particular.
But the resulting “combination” of culture and crime seems to overlook
the role of another important mediating cultural influence on everyday life:
gender. Returning to Simone de Beauvoir’s (1953) seminal The Second
Sex, it is clear that the binary of masculinity and femininity is one—if not
the primary—cultural distinction foisted onto human beings from birth.
Applied to criminology, this helps to connect gender-based dichotomies in
emotion and expression—for example, inclinations toward “active” or
“passive” poses, and toward internalized or “acted out” angers—with
analogously gender-skewed patterns in crime commission and
punishment. In her systematic study, Eileen Leonard (1981) found many
criminological theories could not adequately explain gender differences
in the rates and types of crimes committed. She thus aruged that good
criminlogical theory ought to be able to explain gender disparities in who
commits crime and why.
This brings us to our main purpose here: Why and how does gender
matter for cultural criminology? The significance of gender as a core axis
of both experience and understanding does not appear to have been
deeply incorporated into cultural criminology’s basic analytic framework
at the outset. As we show, gender analysis has tended to appear at the
“margins” rather than as a core element in many works of cultural
criminology despite this perspective’s other major theoretical strengths.
Moreover, cultural criminology has been inclined to treat
“masculinized” activities as its main events—thereafter bringing in
women (and feminist analyses) mostly when women seem to be involved
with what could be called “male-dominated” cultural activities such as
edgework or terrorism. But certainly women can and do engage in
“criminal” cultural activities that do not simply resemble or mimic the
kinds of activities engaged in and studied by men. This is one line of
inquiry cultural criminology can and should pursue, but it is only one of
many possible avenues that gender-cognizant research on crime and
culture could advance.
Given the intellectual context we have sketched, let us turn now to
three themes culled from de Beauvoir (1953), Butler (1990), hooks
(1981, 1984), and Collins (2002), among other feminist theorists in and
outside of sociology and criminology. These themes may be useful for
expanding cultural criminology’s theoretical reach through a widened
“gender” lens. The first theme involves how and where both masculinity
and femininity, in their various iterations, figure into cultural
criminological analyses. Do ideologies of masculinity affect motivations
for crime—and, if so, has this tended to be acknowledged or overlooked
in extant cultural criminological research? Moreover, when the influence
of masculinities as adopted/imposed ideology is acknowledged, how are
particular emotional expressions enabled or blocked? This focus on
masculinity’s influence has appeared in some criminological research
like the work of James Messerschmidt (2014) but has less actively figured
in well-known cultural criminological writings per se. In ensuing sections
we focus on the implication of gender analyses for studying cultural
criminology.
A second theme culled from feminist theory involves the influence on
human behavior and practices of sexuality: Exploring sex has also tended
to be overlooked in research on the “traditional” topics of cultural
criminology, from terrorism through edgework and other subcultural
activities in which both men and women participate. Feminist theorists
have long diagnosed gender as a form of dominance/subordination that
relies for its power on exerting control over women’s (and people’s)
bodies; such controls can be part of culture and its mediations. But greater
attention to sexuality within cultural criminology also suggests paying
close attention to sexualities’ pleasures as well as dangers, that is,
exploring how everyday experiences of desire and attraction often
motivate people across genders toward or away from crime.
Last but just as significantly, a third theme taken from feminist theory
involves the importance of intersectional analyses. Here, we explore how
multiple factors including gender, race, and class can theoretically
expand a “feminist cultural” criminology. Feminist theorists increasingly
insist on recognizing how racialization and class discrimination
profoundly affect cultural life experiences. Such overlapping biases often
contribute to the maintenance of a gendered and heteronormative social
order (e.g., Davis, 2008; Jackson, 2005). While intersectionality at times
seems to be at risk of being reduced to a buzzword, it offers a refinement
of feminist analysis that we consider of major significance for cultural
criminology. We now turn toward showing how these three themes help
to illuminate cultural criminological research on diverse practices from
terrorism to edgework. What insights does and can feminist analysis
bring?

Common Grounds
Before proceeding, a body of already extant scholarship that indicates
growing connections between cultural and feminist criminology needs to
be acknowledged. Seal’s (2013) research on Western media coverage of
the 2012 arrest of the band members of the Russian feminist punk band
Pussy Riot is an example of self-identified “feminist cultural criminology.”
Recognizing the (cultural) criminalization of the band members and their
self-conscious use of imagery and style as a cultural criminological case
study par excellence, Seal explores the changing meaning of the female
protestor in the media as she has been situated in wider geopolitical
discourses. Seal draws on Alison Young’s (1990) argument in Femininity
in Dissent that the female protestor is negatively represented as unruly and
shows that this was not the case for the Western media coverage of Pussy
Riot and their arrests. Rather than depicting the band members as
disruptive, or trivializing or ignoring their outspoken feminism, Seal
(2013) argues that Western media painted these women in a predominantly
positive light. Central to understanding the positive reception is Pussy
Riot’s relationship to post–Cold War Western discourse on Russia. In this
context, Russia is depicted as an authoritarian regime repressing political
dissent and artistic expression. At the same time, the Western media’s
support of Pussy Riot allows for a narrative that promotes gender equality
as a central value of Western societies (Seal, 2013).
Nonetheless, specifying more precisely what is (or could be) a feminist
cultural criminology remains absent in Seal’s work. O’Neill’s (2010)
research on the regulation of sex work in the United Kingdom offers a
clarification of feminist cultural criminological analysis. O’Neill’s work
has two objectives: (a) to develop participatory methodologies of
research that produce politically inclusive forms of knowledge in tune
with policy questions and (b) to overcome binary thinking that currently
dominates feminist debates about sex work. Here, positions that argue for
sex work to be reframed as work/labor under capitalist societies are
juxtaposed with those emphasizing exploitation of (female) sex workers
as victims of patriarchal power relations.
Drawing on the research of Nancy Fraser (2004), O’Neill (2010)
argues for the simultaneous recognition of female sex workers’
subjectivities and of the material conditions within which they work. In
so doing, she combines both feminist and cultural criminological
approaches; cultural criminology provides the basis for O’Neill’s cultural
materialist analysis and informs her participatory and politicized
methodological approach. Indeed, O’Neill’s treatment of the “historical,
cultural, and emotional experiences of the people involved” (p. 219)
resonates with Jock Young’s (2011) concept of the criminological
imagination. O’Neill further argues for the necessity of using the
category of intersectionality to provide—without reverting to binary
thinking—a comprehensive and refined analysis of how both materiality
and redistribution, as well as recognition and identity, profoundly
challenge sexual and social inequalities.
The above illustrations from “feminist cultural criminology” show that
there are intersections between feminist theory and cultural criminology.
Nonetheless, we argue that analytic attention to gender, sexuality, and
intersectionality is relatively marginal in the majority of cultural
criminological research to date. This tendency reproduces a
heteronormative masculine lens that paradoxically blunts the potential
analytic strength of cultural criminology. To make our argument, we
begin by looking at cultural criminological research involving cultural
norms of masculinities and femininities.

Masculinities and Femininities

One of the characteristic features of the cultural criminological
perspective is its emphasis on emotion, sensation, and experience.
People, cultural criminologists contend, do not solely commit crime out
of rational reasons or opportunistic cost-benefit calculations as suggested
in more orthodox criminology. They are also motivated by emotional
rewards, whether “moments of illicit pleasure” (Ferrell, 1996, p. 316) or
other intense emotional experiences of excitement, autonomy, and
visceral self-actualization. Exploring these experiences is certainly
profound for understanding, in Katz’s words, the “seductions of crime.”
However, there are pitfalls in the cultural criminological take on emotions
and experience in criminal activity that become particularly evident when
intertwined with questions of masculinity and femininity. It has been a
common critique by feminist scholars that cultural criminology, in
addition to being overly attuned to certain kinds of crime more frequently
enacted by men, endorses (and at times valorizes) a specific cultural ideal
of “masculine” activity as found in edgework or subcultural activities
wherein men are the predominant actors.
Indeed, cultural criminology has been inclined to treat “masculinized”
activities as its main events. This is the result of, and at the same time has
resulted in, cultural criminology’s tendency to prioritize a certain set of
emotions—thrill, excitement, feelings of pride and self-importance,
control, and power—that are too quickly and often too uncritically seen
as the domain of men. This inclination to perceive “masculinized”
activity and experience as the main event is even evident when research
is fundamentally about exploring notions of femininity, as, for example,
in Alkemade’s (2014) analysis of women in the Japanese Yakuza.
Alkemade is mostly concerned with investigating women’s individual
and subjective experiences, emotions and motivations, and how these
impact daily experiences within a criminal subculture. Despite this
objective, she cautions against the use of “heavily gender-based theories”
(p. 13) such as gender equality theories. She argues that such theories
tend to overemphasize structure at the expense of agency and alone are
insufficient to explain why women participate in organized crime. But
this wariness to engage with feminist theory seems curious as the research
shows strikingly the highly gendered character of women’s daily
experience in the male-dominated Yakuza. Indeed, the machismo and
hypermasculinity prevalent among the Yakuza men result in seeing
women as “insignificant” and “inferior”—if they are seen at all. Women
are expected to conform to traditional feminine roles as housewives and
caretakers, and to provide reproductive, emotional, and sometimes
financial support. However, while the women rarely engage in criminal
activity themselves, Alkemade, drawing on Katz, understands their
motivations as hardly differing at all from those of the Yakuza men.
Deeply fascinated by the thrill and glamor seemingly offered by the
Yakuza underworld, women are eventually attracted by the “seductions
of crime” and its emotional rewards, even if only engaging in it “by
proxy.”
Lured by the Yakuza subculture, women who enter soon find
themselves in a situation characterized by marginalization and
subordination to the men they come to know within a criminal subculture
that is patriarchally organized. Rather than having lives filled with
excitement, they face boredom and routine in their lives as housewives
confined to the domestic sphere. Consequently, they seek alternative
avenues to create a sense of self-control. This happens in a twofold way:
first, they develop an “exaggerated sense of self-importance” (p. 84) as
expressed in the women’s autobiographical accounts, while the “gutting
truth” is that they “may be . . . not that important after all” (Alkemade,
2014, p. 84). Second, they engage in what Alkemade calls “mimicry.”
Often against the will of their husbands or male partners, the women adopt
traditional and traditionally male yakuza activities; they perform
“exclusively male” rituals like getting tattoos. In other words, in reaction
to the dominance of men and as an attempt to achieve a sense of control
and excitement, the women in the Yakuza act “as men amongst
themselves” (p. 84).
Precisely in this argument, though, one can identify a central
shortcoming evident in much cultural criminological work: Despite
engaging with femininity and masculinity, and gendered relations,
Alkemade’s analysis never fully sheds its “hegemonic masculine lens.”
It is left open why women are only able to experience thrill and autonomy
by mimicking and “acting like men” rather than through unmediated
emotional experiences. The notion of mimicry leaves little space for
exploring women’s activities, rituals, and subcultural expressions or for
investigating emotional experiences possibly independent of, and
different from, those felt by men. In addition, it seems difficult to imagine
how any criminal organization—let alone one built on closely knit family
relations like the Yakuza—could survive without the vast amount of
emotional and reproductive work done by women. Yet the analysis
renders these traditionally female activities of lesser importance than the
activities of men and leaves unquestioned the dependence of the latter on
the former. In doing so, it ignores the possibility that the “exaggerated”
sense of self-importance stems from women’s commitment to a certain
ideal of “emphasized femininity” (Connell, 1995).
For our purposes, it may also be useful to ask whether this “masculine
lens” is built into some of the very concepts used by cultural
criminologists—and whether this potentially skewed lens can be
corrected by critically reflecting on cultural mediations of masculinity
and femininity and the relation between them. Here, the cultural
criminological interest in edgework—voluntary high risk-taking—
provides an important case study. The term “edgework” describes acts
entwined around the negotiation of a boundary line—of life and death, or
danger and safety—actively sought by the edgeworker not for any
rational pursuit, but for the very reward of the emotions and sensations
they elicit. While “original” edgework mostly involved extreme leisure
activities (Lyng, 1990), an intellectual convergence with Katz’s
phenomenology of crime may have affected cultural criminologists
starting to draw attention to the similarities between voluntary high-risk
pursuits and the emotional experiences of transgressive acts. Those
engaged in crime as “illicit edgework” expose themselves to high risks
and develop skills, or the physical and mental abilities, to keep
concentration and control in situations characterized by unpredictability
and “chaos.” They act on the edges of safety and danger as much as on
those of legality and illegality, engaging in processes of what Lyng calls
“moral transcendence” (Lyng, 2005, p. 28) by consciously transgressing
rules. In so doing, illicit edgeworkers’ phenomenological experience is
that of a “controlled sense of loss of control” (Hayward, 2004, p. 163) in
a paradoxical situation where the individual feels constantly “at risk”; at
the same time, he or she is externally overcontrolled by structural
conditions. In other words, illicit edgework is a means to exercise control
and autonomy by both symbolically and physically confronting those
sources that seemingly deprive the actor of control over his or her own
fate.
In cultural criminology, illicit edgework tends to disproportionally
take place in what can be seen as “prototypically masculine” high-risk
activities (Ferrell et al., 2015, p. 75) such as graffiti writing or expressive
violent crimes. In fact, edgework started as accounting for high-risk
pursuits that are, as Lyng (1990) posits in one of his earliest formulations
of the concept, “sex-specific” and thus the domain of men. Men’s specific
attraction to edgework, according to Lyng (1990), stems from their
socialization into developing a “skill orientation” (p. 873) that
encourages them to use these skills to control their immediate
environment. This also explains why women lack an interest in edgework
and are less often found among skydivers or BASE jumpers: They are
simply not socialized into risk-taking and this particular skill orientation
involving exertions of control. Lyng’s position on risk-taking is
consequently deeply problematic: It equates risk-taking with “simply
being male” (Chan & Rigakos, 2002, p. 750) and reifies binaries of the
“active” male and the “passive” female. But far from being averse to
them, women take risks—and develop the skill orientation necessary to
do so—on a daily basis by virtue of simply being women in patriarchal
and misogynistic societies. Women are forced to take risks in the most
mundane situations such as walking home alone at night or engaging in
intimate relationships that can turn violent. But these are “risks” imposed
in different ways, and by the same patriarchal system that leads men into
particular risk-taking “attractions”—thus demonstrating the relevance of
gender for a deeper understanding of cultural criminological interest in
(mostly) men’s “edgework.”
Moreover, facing threats of domestic abuse, harassment, and sexual
assault imposed on them by men, women are held responsible for
preventing victimization by means of avoidance and precaution. Every
active exposure to risky situations is accompanied by the necessity to
negotiate the consequences that come with “victim-blaming” when
strategies of risk-management fail (Chan & Rigakos, 2002; Stanko,
1997). Taking into account women’s relational insecurity in patriarchic
societies might explain, better than socialization, why the “escapist
impulses” of indulgent high-risk pursuits are of less attractive. Voluntary
edgework, as feminist scholars have noted (Chan & Rigakos, 2002;
Miller, 1991), is the domain of those holding societal privilege. For
women, in particular working-class women and women of color who face
risks not by choice but by the mere fact of being women, less of a desire
exists to fabricate exceptional risky situations to cope with experiences
of alienation, boredom, and ontological insecurity. Again, then, a full
understanding of “edgework” and risk-taking pursuits necessitates taking
into account the legacies of gender-skewing that go all the way back to
de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex analysis.
In Cultural Criminology: An Invitation, Ferrell et al. (2015) respond to
such criticisms. They acknowledge the argument that a “masculine”
perspective on risk in edgework disregards women’s exposure to
everyday risks, and distance themselves from the gender-unawareness
manifest in early formulations of the concept. They point out that this
argument—albeit applying a different explanatory framework—confirms
the “sex-specificity” of the concept suggested by Lyng. This is precisely
one of the “easy” gender-based dichotomizations that cultural
criminology seeks to avoid. Women, they argue, are drawn to extreme,
voluntary high-risk pursuits equally and for the same reasons as men:
“Both individually and collectively,” they “often constitute some of the
more skilled and esteemed members of illicit edgework subcultures”
(Ferrell et al., 2015, p. 75). Ferrell et al. continue by contending that
edgework allows for understanding gender and gender dynamics,
including the considerable numbers of crimes that produce “hegemonic
masculinity . . . from a mix of risk taking and embodied masculine
emotion, to the detriment of women” (p. 75). These arguments require
critical consideration as they seem contradictory at first glance: either
edgework is a gender-neutral concept or gender matters when it comes to
edgework. The first position suggests that there are no differences
between men and women who seek voluntary high-risk pursuits. But, if
so, the binary of masculinity and femininity so significant as a cultural
influence in most societies from birth is by extension rendered less
important, and transposed into one easily neutralized within and by
cultural practices. A more persuasive second alternative is that both
femininities and masculinities affect why and how women and men
engage in edgework as well as how opportunities, expressions, and
experiences are shaped. For men, then, the cultural inculcation of
masculinities—especially within patriarchal contexts—is likely to have
ideological as well as psychosocial consequences for what it means to
engage in high-risk pursuits. For women, risk-taking is also likely to be
affected in complex ways by gender. Thus, just “adding on” women’s
risk-taking pursuits to what could be partly characterized as enculturated
“masculine” activities— as in Alkemade’s analysis of the Yakuza
women’s activities— risks overlooking that women may engage in
edgework in ways which do not simply mimic the kinds of high-risk
pursuits engaged in by men.
In fact, cultural criminologists rightly point out that women engage in
male-dominated forms of edgework (Naegler, 2014). But what is
important to further theorize is that they never do so in the same ways as
men. For this reason, we argue that it is not possible to do (and to “do”
analyses of) edgework in “gender-neutral” ways—or, for that matter, in
disregard of intersections of class, race, and gender. Rather cultural
mediations of gender are always there, explicitly or implicitly; they are
noticed and experienced by those who engage in edgework, and shape
the ways in which people’s actions are conceived as well as interpreted.
Here, another interesting example is Lois’s (2005) research on volunteer
search and rescue groups as edgework. Lois shows that male participants
were prejudiced against and routinely questioned the physical
competence and abilities of their female colleagues; both men and
women naturalized “confidence” in risk-taking as the result of
testosterone that supposedly made male rescue workers more daring (p.
149). In this setting, then, women adopted a more cautious attitude
toward their work and did not experience the same sense of control their
male peers report—despite the fact that women engaged in the same risky
endeavors as men.
Given the impact of cultural mediations of masculinity and femininity,
these differing perceptions should not be surprising. As Sandra Walklate
(1997) points out, the relationship between men and risk-taking behaviors
is widely perceived as positive, while there exists a negative relationship
between women and risk. Voluntary risk-taking and seeking adventure
and power are what men do “normally” (Walklate, 1997, p. 41), while
women are held responsible for preventing risks of victimization by
taking precautions and not exposing themselves actively to dangers. The
concept of edgework, typically placing excitement and control at the
center of myriad analyses, could therefore be said to incorporate—albeit
unwittingly—the notion of “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell, 1995) by
accepting men’s risk-taking as part of dominant cultural ideals. As a
result, women’s high-risk pursuits tend to be subsumed under a
masculine, or historically male-dominated, cultural framework; in other
words, women who engage in illicit edgework tend to be interpreted as
“acting like men” whether in situations where their behavior is
condemned or where viewed positively and admired. This has the further
effect of rendering female edgeworkers as an exception from a
(gendered) norm; their specific experiences may be overlooked precisely
because of the dominance of hegemonic notions of “femininity” and
“masculinity” in relation to risk.

Sexuality
A second theme further shows how work in cultural criminology could
benefit from according ideas culled from feminist theory. Here, we turn
to the role of sexuality in everyday “cultural” life and the extent to which
this is often acknowledged, or may be overlooked, in many cultural
criminological analyses. Indeed, cultural criminology offers a lens
through which behaviors recognized as meaningless or self-destructive
can be understood as exciting; it is an approach that accords actors the
capacity to derive pleasure from actions otherwise quickly deemed
“deviant.” Yet many studies within cultural criminology have not
sufficiently grappled with questions of sexual desire and attraction as
these interact with gender-influenced risk-taking and other meaning-
making ventures. Then too, at times, cultural criminologists seem to
perceive erotic desires and thrills as identical for men and women rather
than investigating culturally gendered differences in how diverse
sexualities develop and are experienced.
We begin with the first point (i.e., a tendency to mute and overlook the
role of sexualities and attraction) before proceeding to the second (i.e., a
tendency to presume sexual experiences to be relatively the same for men
and women). The first can be exemplified through cultural criminological
accounts of terrorism. In a seminal article on the emotive elements of
terror, Cottee and Hayward (2011) offer compelling yet arguably
incomplete accounts of the appeal of terrorism. They examine narratives
of violence, highlighting excitement and desires for meaning and glory
as underpinning motives. But the extent to which erotic desires shape
perceptions of what is thrilling and meaningful may be analytically
omitted from these authors’ narratives, which tend to take the actor’s
gender and sexuality for granted. For example, Cottee and Hayward cite
Michael Baumann’s autobiographic account of his life as a West German
guerrilla, describing how:

He was constantly in motion, always moving from flat to flat and

from woman to woman. He did a lot of drugs . . . [Never] short of
money from all the robberies his group were committing . . . (p. 970)

But the fantastical narrative, used to illustrate the emotional

underpinnings of political violence, would not explain the seductions of
this lifestyle if the actor were anything but a heterosexual man. Baumann
desires the freedom to dispose of things, casually making the transition
from material goods to women. He depicts a James Bond–like fantasy of
wealth, sex, and drugs. Baumann finds thrilling that which signifies an
exaggerated masculine ideal: the conspicuous consumption of things, and
a casual and objectifying disregard for women, both signs of the
successful achievement of manhood. Consequently, Baumann’s identity
as a heterosexual man informs the emotional basis of his attraction to
guerrilla fighting; he is attracted to a lifestyle that allows him to realize
an exaggerated heteronormative masculinity, one largely unattainable but
nevertheless rendered highly desirable in popular culture.
 Furthermore, a disregard for women is contrasted with accounts of
love for one’s comrades that appear elsewhere in the article and suggest
a possibly homoerotic element within the depicted attraction to terror.
While Cottee and Hayward (2011) note that love for one’s comrades
supersedes political or religious motivations among terrorists, they
underestimate the extent to which such love can be rooted in men’s
desires to be with one another:

This sense of fierce commitment to one another [Sebastian] Junger

categorizes as a form of love. Not romantic love but the no less
charged and encompassing love of comradeship, where every man
fights not out of adherence to some abstract idea, but in order to
defend his fellow comrade. (p. 977)

Distinguishing “comradely love” from “romantic love” has the effect of

preempting investigation into even the possibility that homoerotic
feelings may also be afoot. The love felt in battle may not be romantic,
but it certainly appears erotic; the wish to die for one’s comrades is an
intense wish. The men spend significant time together both in and out of
battle, forming strong relationships with one another. Moreover, the
desires in question are ostensibly desires to be with, if we reference
Herbert Marcuse’s concept of Eros as the human drive of love
(1955/1966). Thus, what Cottee and Hayward (2011) describe, if not
romantic, may comprise both homosocial and homoerotic desires to be
with, which the men reflect in their expressed willingness to die for each
other. The men would rather die than see their comrades (their loved
ones) die before them. At least potentially, these may also be expressions
of sexuality and desire that deserve deeper analysis especially in relation
to how women (and relationships with women) are viewed. For the way
the men relate to each other in battle offers a curious contrast with the
carelessness, the comparative disregard, articulated when they describe
their sexual escapades with women; the former emotions seem deeper
when contrasted with the relative superficiality of the latter. It would
seem, then, that cultural criminology could gain from feminist theories
about sexuality (and sexualities) which offer a more multidimensional
analytic framework by which to explain what may be attractive about
terrorism for the heterosexual men the article studies.
But another issue also arises with regard to cultural criminology’s
ability to multidimensionally analyze terror: What about women
terrorists and their motivations? Since 2014, the world has been grappling
with the rise of the terrorist group, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
(ISIL), specifically with its appeal to young men and women. News
media have been unable to understand ISIL’s success at recruiting young
women, often referring to the recruits as “lured prey” and “fangirls.” Part
of the difficulty is that some are as young as 16 years of age, that is,
adolescent girls with little life experience to guide them. However, the
bigger issue is that women of various ages appear ready to leave
everything behind to marry an ISIL warrior and keep the mission of ISIL
alive. The notion of predation is solely applied to women. Men are either
predators or active participants who join ISIL because of its millennial
ideology, its promises of glory, and its encouragement of enslavement
and rape of non-Muslim women. What eludes media analysis, reflecting
cultural reluctance to recognize the agency of female desire, is that
sexuality appears central to ISIL’s recruitment both for men and women.
For women, ISIL glorifies the notion of marrying a warrior, referring to
ISIL women as “mothers of believers”; it offers women a pseudofeminist
narrative of autonomy from the meek authority of clerics and even
parents. Finally and simply, marriage to an ISIL warrior offers women a
chance to experience sex.
Unfortunately, not just the media but cultural criminology has also
generally overlooked this possibly sexual dimension of ISIL’s attractions
for women. In popular publications, Cottee vacillates between describing
ISIL women as “fangirls” who are infatuated with ISIL warriors (2015)
and rejecting the notion that ISIL women are “fangirls” who are seduced
by ISIL boys (2016). Neither position, though, treats women’s sexual
desires as potential motivation. In the first instance, referring to young
women as “fangirls” obscures what may be desires for (and curiosity
about) sex as well as hopes of autonomy from parental and community
control. By portraying women as relatively passive, this also overlooks
reports based on interviews with defected ISIL women suggesting that
they sometimes play a significant role in the nonmilitant wings of ISIL
(i.e., in both the morality brigade and the sex-slave trade that are central
to ISIL’s success, see Speckhard & Yayla, 2015).
The other characterization—that the women are simply fiercely
committed to the ideology of ISIL—is also problematic insofar as it fails
to allow that women can be “seduced” by something without becoming
hapless and losing their agency. Indeed, cultural criminological accounts
of terrorism recognize that men who engage in terrorism are motivated
primarily by immediate goals like living out a fantastic lifestyle of thrill
and excitement, or dying for each other in battle (Cottee & Hayward,
2011); these accounts characterize men as actively rather than passively
“seduced.” But if men can be seduced by glory, material things, and sex
without giving up their agency, women can also be seduced by glory,
material things, and sex without becoming passive “lured” prey. In other
words, one should not dismiss the notion that women join ISIL as wives
of fighters who seek love and companionship in marriage. They believe
in the ideology of ISIL, but they are also seduced by the immediate
prospect of autonomy, power, and romantic relations. In a New York
Times report, women who defected from the group openly talked about
enjoying power and the fear they struck in their communities as they led
the morality brigade and imposed codes of modesty on other women.
This suggested both a desire for traditional gender roles provided by
marriage and pleasure in exercising power over other women. Some
lamented of soon losing the excitement of love and sex and expressed
sadness over their husbands’ deaths in suicide missions (Moaveni, 2015).
Overall, then, Cottee’s analysis (2016) overlooks the extent to which
both masculine and feminine gender ideals shape young people’s desires
to join ISIL while underestimating the extent to which women can and
are agents of their own sexualities. Desiring sex does not reduce women
to lured prey, nor does it necessarily take away from their ideological
commitment to the group’s mission. Rather— as may be a point from
feminist theory important to recognize in and beyond cultural
criminology— sexuality functions as a major motivation for men and
women (see Reich [1972] 2012). But what about the second respect in
which cultural criminology has not fully incorporated understandings of
sexuality—this one not so much a tendency to mute and overlook the role
of sex and attraction but to presume that sexualities are similar rather than
possibly different across genders?
Concerning the second point, let us turn to Gailey’s (2009) research on
women’s engagement in the pro-ana community. Gailey describes a
(mostly) virtual community that interprets anorexia and bulimia as
“female edgework,” that is, as voluntary choices of lifestyle made by
young, predominantly White middle-class women who push themselves
to the edges of life and death within this community. In so doing, they
experience corporeal sensations and intense emotions described as
fulfilling, as well as a sense of autonomy in their everyday lives. Gailey
argues that these pro-ana women construct their activities in terms of
choices that, in turn, challenge gendered stereotypes of feminine
passivity (p. 106).
As Gailey emphasizes, understanding the young women’s activities as
edgework rather than falling back on pathologizing perspectives about
eating disorders qua mental illness allows for taking women’s agency
into account. She concludes that, therefore, edgework cannot be
considered a male-dominated behavior because women engage in
edgework similar to men: Their experiences and motivations do not differ
qualitatively from the kind of masculine high-risk activities highlighted
in cultural criminological accounts. Where gender does make a difference
though, she argues, is in responses and reactions—That is, women are
more likely than men to become stigmatized when engaging in high-risk
pursuits. To be sure, Gailey is correct to note how women’s risk-taking
endeavors are stigmatized and overlooked. But, more importantly for our
purposes here, Gailey’s example of female edgework ironically
demonstrates that women do not engage in edgework in exactly the same
way or for the same reasons as men. Certainly men and women are not
ontologically different; however, their experiences, accesses, and
sometimes motivations are dissimilar precisely because they are subject
to different cultural and social expectations and reactions. In this case,
women’s choices to engage in explicitly “female” edgework result from
seeking avenues of emotional self-expression, control, and even the
fulfillment of erotic desires otherwise blocked. As Gailey quotes one of
her participants describing after starting to fast after “restraint” eating,
the visceral experience of starvation holds a distinctly erotic dimension:

But I’ll starve myself again, for the sense of power over my body.
It’s almost an erotic feeling. Feeling better about your body is
extremely sensuous. (p. 104)

Gailey insists that the erotic pleasure experienced is same as the thrills
sought by graffiti artists and skydivers. Yet this argument does not
explain why young women seek erotic experiences that morph into
hidden and self-directed violence (and self-destructiveness). Pro-ana
subculture seems to manifest women’s desire to experience their
sexualities as independent from those of men. But the physical harm self-
imposed by pro-ana women reveals something more problematic: For
women, whose sexual freedom and sexual expressiveness have
historically been blocked and subordinated in male-centric cultures like
our own, risk-taking pursuits may be both liberating and internally
destructive, rendering pro-ana subculture a violent reaction to a violent
culture of control in ways different than men may experience.
Indeed, as Chan and Rigakos (2002) point out, women who seek
excitement and erotic pleasure in risky encounters have to negotiate not
only risks of physical harm but also a culture hostile to women’s
sexuality. Women’s supposed sexual “promiscuity” is still widely
considered deviant; it is publicly shamed and represented as justifications
for sexual and physical violence, and too often for rape, enacted by men
against women. Thus, female “sexual edgeworkers” are distinct from
male “sexual edgeworkers” in that the former must “carefully negotiate
the structurally imposed line between . . . the Madonna and the whore
image” (Chan & Rigakos, 2002, p. 755). In contrast with men, women
often need to adopt additional/extra strategies of risk-management to
prevent judgment, negative labeling, condemnation, and violence. Far
from being the same as men’s edgework, then, women’s edgework
appears to take place against a different cultural backdrop and within a
different context—and, as such may be differently motivated.

Intersectionality
When it comes to a third theme—intersectionality—it should be noted
that efforts have been made within cultural criminology to incorporate
this important and relatively recent emphasis in the unfolding of feminist
theory. Contemporary feminist theory and research have evolved to the
point where studying intersectionality—that is, how gender, sexualities,
race/ethnicity, and class discriminations overlap—has become common.
Feminist scholars have learned to investigate both women’s relative
powerlessness in patriarchal societies and interconnections between
class, race, and gender, that is, multiple and complicated experiences of
oppression and domination that are phenomenologically experienced.
Nonetheless, within cultural criminology, examples can be found both of
scholarship that can gain from a fuller interpretation of intersectionality
and of research admirably attentive to interrelated experiences of race,
class, gender, and sexual biases.
Returning to research on terrorism, the work of Mark Hamm—while
not explicitly using the vocabulary of intersectionality—nonetheless
targets the role of class and race in illuminating the rise of White
supremacist terrorist groups in the United States. In a 2004 article, Hamm
finds that neo-Nazi groups are mostly comprised of young, working-class
White men. Some of the young men have witnessed social decay in their
communities, thereafter drifting into delinquency; others’ lives develop
differently. But attraction often occurs when the young men are
introduced to a subculture that has a specific style and ethos, triggering
“the vitality . . . necessary for skinheads to ‘go berserk’ on their perceived
enemies” (Hamm, 2004, p. 327). Thus, Hamm compellingly makes the
connection between being a young White working-class man in a
postindustrial society and the appeal of militant White supremacy
subcultures. Yet what his analysis overlooks is the extent to which
culturally specific expectations of White working-class men leave some,
who do not fulfill said expectations, more “vulnerable” than others to the
seductions of macho White supremacy. This is where individual
differences, including psychosocially unique biographies, become
relevant—and where cultural criminological study of terrorism forces us
to reckon with the hard fact that those who inflict brutal violence are
complicated indeed, and can differ greatly as to how their personal
histories mix class and racial factors with biases more specifically related
to gender, sexuality as well as personality.
Take Hamm’s case study of Peter Langan: It illustrates how an analysis
already alive to race and class influences might have further benefited
from taking gender, sexuality, and the psychosocial further into account
(Hamm, 2004). Langan was the founder of the Aryan Republican Army
(ARA) and had a criminal history that included illegal trafficking in
firearms and explosives. In 1992, the FBI pursued him for his
involvement in a plot to assassinate President George H. Bush (Hamm,
2004). In terms of what C. Wright Mills called personal biography,
Langan was born in 1958 to Eugene Langan and Mary Ann McGregor;
he was one of six children and soon became his mother’s favorite child,
receiving “feminine pampering during his formative years” (Hamm,
2004, p. 329). But Hamm does not make clear what he means by
“feminine pampering” and what role, if any, this played in generating
Langan’s delinquency and turn to political violence. Unexplained,
Langan’s relationship with his mother is woven into the narrative of
drifting with the tacit assumption that readers share a singular definition
of masculinity such that a “mama’s boy” who receives “feminine
pampering” needs no further explanation. Presumed is that boys who
have too close of a relation with their mothers turn out to be less-than-
ideal men: In this case, for instance, Langan was sexually confused, an
ARA leader by day and cross-dresser by night (Hamm, 2004).
While there were other factors contributing to Langan’s unraveling,
Hamm returns to Langan’s relationship with his mother. He recounts the
Langan family relocating in 1961 to Saigon where Eugene was involved
in a political plot to assassinate South Vietnam’s president Ngô Đình
Diệm. The family returned to the United States in 1963 where Langan’s
French and Vietnamese fluency and appearance made him a target of
bullying in school: “Almost overnight, he went from being a pampered
mama’s boy to being the victim of hate” (Hamm, 2004, p. 330). While
the turn to sex, drugs, and rock and roll is in many ways in the 1960s
“spirit of the times” (Hamm, 2004, p. 330), there is a persistent hint that
Langan’s delinquency was linked to the loss of his father, and his
“confusion over his newly discovered urge to dress up in his mother’s
clothing” (Hamm, 2004, p. 330). Hamm’s case study is eventually
explained in terms of “a crisis in masculinity” whereby Langan turned to
White Power to gain the respect of other men (p. 336). Problematically,
though, Langan’s “crisis” of realizing a specific masculine ideal is left
unexplored in the article. In fact, what Langan struggled with is a
heteronormative articulation of masculinity, often normalized in White
lower-middle and working-class communities, that left Langan a victim
of bullying as a child in school and of sexual violence as a young man in
prison. Thus, by referring to Langan as a “mama’s boy” without
exploring the ideological content of this term, Hamm inadvertently reifies
the very masculinity that precipitated Langan’s crisis. Simultaneously,
Hamm’s account is left unable to explain with full multidimensionality
the biographical narrative he otherwise quite thoroughly explores.
Langan’s narrative also suggests other problems that might have been
advantageously explored: Not only sexuality but gendered mandates may
have been relevant to his case given hegemonic social expectations of
child-rearing that may have left him especially vulnerable to violence. As
an adult, Langan struggled to live up to rigid codes of gender as well as
sexuality that mutually constitute normative masculinity. Moreover, both
factors arguably help to explain his attraction to right wing militancy.
Langan desired a transgressive and socially stigmatized identity while
desiring a repressive social order wherein such differences are flattened.
Langan’s gender identity crisis in a world hostile to nongender
conformists left him alienated and, in turn, susceptible to right wing
authoritarianism. A violent macho group appeared, then, as an avenue to
relieve the pain of not fitting into the world as well as providing a façade
beneath which he could explore his nonconforming desires.
If Hamm’s work exemplifies cultural criminological scholarship
focused on race and class potentially deepened by greater attention to
gender and sexuality-based norms, the work of feminist criminologists
such as Eleanor Miller and Valli Rajah —both of whom studied
edgework—illustrates research explicitly attuned to gender and sexuality
that also integrates sensitivity to racial and class biases women and men
face. Both Miller and Rajah illustrate that while much cultural
criminological work has not adequately used feminist theory, important
exceptions exist. Thus, Miller (1986, 1991), a feminist Marxist and strong
critic of Lyng, utilizes the edgework concept in her research on female
African American street sex workers who “choose especially risky
hustles” (Miller, 1991, p. 1533). As she contends, women involved with
high-risk encounters are motivated similarly as Lyng’s edgeworkers to
seek excitement, adrenaline rushes, and the achievement of a sense of
control and autonomy in situations otherwise pervaded by everyday
experiences of powerlessness and male objectification.
Analogously, in her study of poor, drug-using and largely African
American and Puerto Rican women who experience habitual domestic
abuse by their male partners, Rajah (2007) identifies activities she calls
“edgework-resistance.” In attempting to rebel against the constraints and
patriarchal control of their intimate partners, women overtly and covertly
“resist” in borderline zones of safety-and-relative danger; they undertake
small acts of defiance and disobedience, aware that they risk physical
harm should their partners retaliate violently. Acts of edgework-
resistance thus draw on “context-specific” knowledge such as partner’s
habits, weaknesses, strengths, dislikes, and/or probable reactions; if
accomplished successfully, such acts provide for “embodied rewards”
(Rajah, 2007, p. 201) like experiences of autonomy and self-
determination.
Both Rajah and Miller show that by engaging in edgework, women use
agency in eliciting emotional pursuits and visceral pleasures within
situations marked by their relative powerlessness; these situations
thereby allow for enactments of control. However, women who engage
in edgework are not simply “mimicking” men, as in the critique presented
above, but develop specific social practices shaped by the combination
of their multiple, “intersectional” experiences of oppression. This can
result in women’s resistance to one specific form of oppression all the
while their practices are subtly reproducing another. As Rajah points out,
the women in her study are forced to negotiate between resistance and
financial dependency to their male partners, and between cultural
imperatives that assign responsibility to women for preventing domestic
abuse while demanding that they maintain the stability of a relationship.
By acting in stereotypical feminine ways while high risk-taking, women
may contribute to the maintenance of the current gendered social order
(analogously to how, in male-dominated edgework, masculine gender
stereotypes are also reproduced). In addition, Miller emphasizes that the
illegal sex work subject of her study is a high-risk situation almost by
definition; given dangers of arrest and/or physical violence by men, this
is so regardless of whether women seek or avoid risky situations. In both
cases, women’s edgework is not a “desired choice” but must be
understood in the context of structural inequality, economic
marginalization, and dependency; without a sense of gender, race, and
class intersectionality, both of their case studies would be only partially
explanatory. For it is because of multiple overlapping social factors that
these examples of women’s edgework involve risks that “far exceeds
those of working- and middle-class white men” (Miller, 1991, p. 1532).
Consequently, edgework practices have very different cultural meanings
depending on gender, sexuality, race, and class; while “experimentally
and in terms of social psychological impact, edgework might be
functionally equivalent across [different societal] groups,” the “structures
of oppression to which [edgework] responds are unique” (Miller, 1991,
pp. 1533-1534).
Such attentiveness to intersections of class, race, and gender in Miller’s
and Rajah’s accounts allows for a necessary refinement of the edgework
concept by making visible both women’s relative powerlessness in
contemporary society and their attempts to control or resist multiple
forms of oppression. Men’s edgework (and “masculine” edgework)
needs to be analyzed with a similarly sophisticated sense of
multidimensionality, and with analogous sensitivity to men’s experiences
of power and powerlessness as both shape their risk-taking pursuits and
motivations.

Discussion
Cultural criminologists often emphasize this perspective’s advantages as
a “free intellectual space” for the critique of orthodox criminologies.
Indeed, cultural criminology offers progressive analyses and “invitational
openness” (Ferrell et al., 2015, p. 25) that is friendly toward feminist
endeavors and critical of male-dominated societies’ historical sexism. It
is exactly in this spirit that this article has offered an equally friendly
critique, calling for gender to become a regular and not “added on”
component of cultural criminology’s theoretical program and empirical
investigations. To date, albeit with some exceptions, cultural criminology
has tended to “add on” considerations of gender and sexuality rather than
according both key places in its research and scholarly investigations. In
turn, however unintentionally, this lack of gender awareness risks
mimicking the effects of sexism itself through the unwitting
incorporation of a hegemonic, “masculine” analytic lens.
Moreover, the above problem hinders the ability of the perspective to
fully grasp the complexity of cultural dynamics as they influence, and are
influenced by, also distinctively cultural mediations of gender and sex.
While cultural criminology has succeeded in exemplifying Clifford
Geertz’s concept of thick description, offering detailed accounts of social
actors’ everyday lives in both ordinary and extraordinary moments, it
may have not accorded gender and sexuality their due as these affect the
multidimensionality of human practices. This relative overlooking of
gender and sex as units of analysis presents a problem given the
perspective’s intention of elucidating the emotive bases of deviance and
transgression. For the attractions of crime cannot be fully explained
without accounting for hegemonic codes of femininity and masculinity,
and for societal repression of desires and emotions. Thus, while
conventional studies of crime and transgression can and should learn
from the cultural criminological approach, cultural criminology can
enrich its own otherwise rich interpretive powers by moving gender and
sex—as objects of analysis—from its margins to its center.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to
the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Acknowledgements
We thank the reviewers for their helpful feedback, Lynn Chancer and
Dan Douglas for their editorial suggestions.

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Author Biographies

Laura Naegler, PhD, is a lecturer in sociology, social policy, and

criminology at the University of Liverpool in Singapore. Her research
interests are critical and cultural criminology, the study of social
movements, social unrest, changing processes of democratization, and
“new” forms of democratic participation. She has conducted, among
others, critical ethnographic research with the post-Occupy movement in
New York City and is author of Gentrification and Resistance (LIT
Verlag, Berlin; 2012), a study of antigentrification movements in
Hamburg, Germany.

Sara Salman is a PhD candidate in sociology at the Graduate Center,

City University of New York. Her dissertation is a comparative study
examining citizenship in late modernity. She has conducted ethnographic
research in Michigan and New York investigating poverty and
displacement, and government assistance programs. She has also written
on war and genocide, political unrest in the Middle East, and the
influence of existentialism and psychoanalysis on contemporary social
theory.