Queering Criminologies

Since the 1990s, there has been amove towards an academic articulation of the nexus between queer and criminology. This move is significant because previously criminology and queer theories/methodologies have been somewhat awkward and perhaps dangerous bedfellows (Ball forthcoming). This is not to say that criminological research has not engaged with issues around sexuality, gender, and sex diversity. On the contrary, people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ),1 and with many other fluid categories of sexuality, gender, and sex diversity, have been the subject of many research studies, but in the past these studies have been informed by a ‘deficit’ or ‘deviancy’ model (Groombridge 1999: 540; Woods 2014). Early criminological work was steeped in the notion that people who displayed characteristics of homosexuality, for instance, were considered a ‘defective sexual species’ (Tomsen 1997: 33) and were studied by criminologists and other social scientists in terms of how they might be cured and controlled. Legislative structures and other governmental mechanisms developed along with these ideas and resultantly criminalized behaviours that queered heterosexuality, and, in particular, sexual contact between men (LeVay 1996; Rydstrom & Mustola 2007; Gunther 2009; Nussbaum 2010).