Feminist Criminology and the Visual

Abstract

In response to the limitations of mainstream criminology, feminist and visual criminology offer alternative approaches to the study of crime, deviance, justice institutions, and the people implicated by them. Although feminist and visual lines of criminological inquiry have distinct foci and analytical strengths, they both illuminate disciplinary blind spots. Feminist criminology responds to criminology’s embedded gender biases, while visual criminology challenges criminology’s reliance on text and numbers. They offer approaches to redress criminology’s general lack of attention to the broader cultural dynamics that inform crime, both as a category and as a practice. Unpacking the visual through a feminist criminological lens is an emergent critical project, one that brings together and extends existing feminist and visual criminological practices. Combining feminist criminology and visual studies offers new possibilities in the areas of theory and methodology. Doing so also lends to new modes through which to query gendered power relationships embedded in the images of crime, deviance, and culture. Moreover, such an approach provides alternative lenses for illuminating the constitutive relationships between visuality, crime, and society, many of which exceed mainstream criminological framings. It brings together interdisciplinary perspectives from feminist studies and visual studies rarely engaged by mainstream criminology. Thus, a feminist visual criminology, as an extension of feminist criminology’s deconstructivist aims, has the potential to pose significant—arguably foundational—critiques of mainstream criminology.