The Margins of Criminology: Challenges from a Feminist Epistemological Perspective

Camila Prando

doi:10.5204/ijcjsd.v8i1.946

Abstract

From Zaffaroni’s proposal for the production of a criminology with a marginal perspective, and based on the contributions of the feminist standpoint theory, this paper examines the limits of critical criminology in Brazil and the likely effect the stabilisation of the binary body–mind is able to produce in critical thinking.

Highlights

In the 1980s and 1990s, Zaffaroni (1988,1989, 2001) explored the margins of criminology and pondered the possibilities of some knowledge being able to understand the dynamics of violence of a racist and colonial criminal control in the region of peripheral power
The author considered the task of a criminology study from a marginal point of view to be the permanent ideological critique, defined by him as a way to ‘establish a system of ideas able to access reality’ (Zaffaroni 1988: 22)
He claimed: the marginal criminological realism critique is a kind of countercultural thinking within our own peripheral societies if by ‘cultural’ we mean the thought’s issues and habits of our middle and intellectual classes. (Zaffaroni 1988: 24)

Summary

Introduction

In the 1980s and 1990s, Zaffaroni (1988,1989, 2001) explored the margins of criminology and pondered the possibilities of some knowledge being able to understand the dynamics of violence of a racist and colonial criminal control in the region of peripheral power. My objective is to advance the epistemological debate on the modern scientific production premises applied to the field of critical criminology in trying to comprehend its limits in Brazil (Harding 1993b).

Results

Conclusion