Postmodern Criminology and its Feminist Discontents

Abstract

This article examines the work of self-defined exponents of a “postmodern” criminology. This school of critical criminology takes Jack Katz's Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil (1988) as its foundational text. Because Katz's book focuses on the sensual feel rather than on the causes of criminal behaviour, it has been acclaimed as a new and even heroic, post-positivistic approach to criminality. It is neither. Moreover, from any feminist perspective, there is nothing critical about it. The foundational concepts of Katzian-inflected “postmodern” criminology are caught in the same universalising, androcentric paradigms which bedevil the positivistic criminology it claims to displace. The so-called “postmoderism” which is said to inform this new school displays a spectacular ignorance of the conceptual advances made by feminist poststructuralist theorists in a range of fields. More broadly, this article aims to show that nothing, and certainly not the “postmodernism” of the Katzians, can save criminology as a discipline. Criminology in its ostensibly post-positivistic and “postmodern” formations is as intellectually and politically bankrupt as the positivism it imagines it transcends.