As a nascent sub-discipline, queer criminology has been fundamentally concerned with questions about its identity and scope. Within these debates, several scholars have argued that queer criminology's central purpose is to correct the discipline's long-standing neglect of LGBTQ people's experiences. However, queer criminology has predominantly addressed this neglect by focusing on the experiences of queer research subjects rather than queer researchers. By examining the experiences of three queer researchers conducting anti-queer violence research, this article explores the deeply affective nature of queer criminological work and its implications for contemporary debates about queering the field. It contends that queer research relies on the interconnectedness of intellectual and affective engagement with its subject matter in ways that challenge the discipline's conventionally masculinist approach to knowledge production. Yet, it also shows that affective investments in queer criminological research are not inherently emancipatory-they can also entangle researchers in the same structures of domination and extraction that their work seeks to resist. On this basis, the article argues that queering criminology requires more than merely incorporating queer experiences into the discipline. It also demands recognising, activating, and engaging critically with the uniquely affective character of those experiences, including those of researchers themselves.

What does good theorizing look like? And how can or should theorizing be taught? This article challenges the static and exegetic approaches to theorizing that have been normalized in university teaching by explicating a novel approach to theorizing through play. To develop this approach, we reflect critically on how we implemented play as a method for teaching social theory in an undergraduate classroom and analyze the theoretical outcomes our playful activities produced. In reflecting on these experiences, we argue that play can destabilize conventional scholarly approaches to social theorizing and foster more creative ways of generating and relating to it. We also discuss several challenges we encountered introducing play into our classrooms, showing how play can disrupt some of the normative dispositions that structure theoretical practice in the neoliberal university. In naming, analyzing, and arguing for the importance of those disruptions, we consider how play might enhance social theorizing within and beyond the classroom.

Criminology has increasingly recognized the roles technologies play in an array of harms, with scholars developing a variety of techno-social accounts of crime and harm. In developing such accounts, scholars face the challenge of adequately accounting for the myriad ways humans can, whether intended or not, harm with things. This article argues that this challenge can be addressed by disentangling the concatenation of relations between intentions, actions, ends, and technologies that underpin harmful events. Specifically, we draw on insights from the philosophy of action to generate a typology that establishes the specific relationships between these factors that coalesce when technologies are involved in harmful acts, distinguishing between six ways people can use technology in ways that harm. We then demonstrate the utility of our framework to criminology and zemiology by applying it to two examples: first, we show how our framework can clarify the definitional boundaries of technology-facilitated violence, and second, we explain how the relationship between user intention, actions, and goals can explain the pervasiveness of ‘ordinary’ environmental harms. Our approach complements critical criminological scholarship by bridging micro, meso, and macro approaches to examining the relationship between technology and harm.

While criminology has studied news media reporting for decades, it has largely overlooked reporting on anti-queer violence and depictions of crime outside mainstream outlets. This article addresses this gap by analysing how anti-queer violence is represented in LGBTQ community media. By analysing 1,295 articles from 11 LGBTQ publications across five Anglophone countries between 2019 and 2021, we examine which forms of anti-queer violence are deemed newsworthy in these outlets. Our analysis reveals that LGBTQ community media emphasize particular types of violence, relationships between victims and perpetrators and contexts of victimization while downplaying or disregarding others. We argue that this selective representation both mirrors and 'queers' prevailing norms in mainstream crime news reporting in culturally and criminologically significant ways. In grappling with this tension, we identify and critique several cisheteronormative assumptions embedded in the existing literature on news media representations of crime. Ultimately, our analysis calls for a re-evaluation and revision of the existing discourse within media criminology, urging scholars to engage with a broader range of experiences, communities and narrative practices to understand better how violence is culturally mediated.

Legal institutions worldwide construct theories about gender’s ontology—i.e., theories about what gender is —and use those constructions to govern. In this article, I analyse how the Family Court of Australia constructed ontologies of gender to govern young people’s gender-affirming hormone use. By analysing the ‘reasons for judgment’ published about cases where minors applied for the Court’s authorisation to use hormones, I show that the Court constructed two theories about the ontology of gender concurrently—one essentialist and the other performative—which it leveraged to arbitrate the legitimacy of hormone use. By critically examining the Court’s ontological assertions, I argue that both theories advanced anti-queer directives that tethered the legitimacy of hormone use to its promise to produce normatively gendered subjects. This analysis highlights that legal regimes concerned with controlling gender-affirming practices have much more at stake than access to those practices alone. By governing mechanisms of gender’s production, these regimes do not merely shape how gender can be expressed but also the possible forms of gender itself.

PurposeThis article develops a methodological framework to support qualitative analyses of legal texts. Scholars across the social sciences and humanities use qualitative methods to study legal phenomena but often overlook formal legal texts as productive sites for analysis. Moreover, when qualitative researchers do analyze legal texts, they rarely discuss the methodological underpinnings that support their approach. A thorough consideration of the methodological underpinnings of qualitative approaches to legal analysis is therefore warranted.Design/methodology/approachBy bringing critical legal theory into conversation with qualitative methodology, this article outlines a set of key principles to inform qualitative approaches to reading the law.FindingsTo construct this methodological framework, this article first distinguishes between qualitative approaches to textual analysis and the doctrinal approaches undertaken in legal practice and formal legal scholarship. It then considers how this qualitative approach might be applied to one particular genre of legal text: namely, judicial opinions, otherwise known as reasons for judgment. In doing so, it argues that robust qualitative analyses of legal texts must consider the unique characteristics of those texts, such as their distinct form, voice, rhetorical structure, and performative capabilities.Originality/valueThe methodological framework outlined here should encourage qualitative researchers to approach legal texts more readily and challenge the hegemony of doctrinal approaches to legal interpretation in social science research.

Technologies not only extend capabilities but also mediate experience and action. To date, however, research on technology-facilitated violence has not focused on the role technological mediation plays in acts of violence facilitated through technology. In response to this lacuna, this article develops a theoretical framework and typology for understanding the role technological mediation plays in producing technology-facilitated violence. First, drawing on postphenomenological theories of technology, we argue that technology-facilitated violence is best understood as a form of 'harm translation,' where a technology's affordances and other properties 'invite' an individual to actualize harmful ends. Then, distinguishing between four modes of harm translation, we construct a typology for analysing the intersections between user intention and technological design that, together, facilitate violence. We argue that by attending to these distinctions our typology helps researchers and designers identify and address the specific causal dynamics involved in producing different kinds of technology-facilitated harm.

This article provides a conceptual review of the term ‘technology-facilitated violence’. In the last decade, discussion of technology-facilitated violence has become commonplace in criminological and social scientific discourses. Yet, scholars have not settled on what this term means or the kind of relationship between technology and violence it infers. Addressing this ambiguity, we review how scholars have conceptualised technology-facilitated violence, evaluate the adequacy of those conceptualisations, and develop strategies to improve them. To do so, we bring the philosophy of technology into conversation with the scholarship on technology-facilitated violence to identify the latent theories of technology that underpin existing definitions of technology-facilitated violence. Then, synthesising insights from these two fields of scholarship, we generate a new definition of technology-facilitated violence that builds on the strengths of existing definitions while avoiding their key limitations. This new definition and the conceptual review that informs it should improve scholarly understandings of technology-facilitated violence and help design better strategies to address its harms. Hence, we conclude by emphasising the importance of this kind of conceptual and synthetic work and the value it offers scholars concerned with improving both theory and practice.

Trans and gender diverse (TGD) people are disproportionately criminalised and face unique vulnerabilities when interacting with the criminal legal system. However, very little is known about TGD people’s experiences of criminalisation in Australia or the strategies TGD people and their advocates use to navigate the criminal legal system. Based on survey responses from TGD people with lived experience of criminalisation and lawyers with experience representing TGD clients, this article identifies several critical issues with the criminal legal system’s treatment of TGD people and outlines the strategies TGD people and their representatives suggest to address these issues. On this basis, we argue that criminologists and criminal legal practitioners urgently need to interrogate and work towards ameliorating the criminal legal system’s treatment of gender diversity. These insights will be crucial in informing future advocacy efforts and reform agendas, given that knowledge in this area is severely lacking.

Since the turn of the century, public inquiries into the perpetration and concealment of child sexual abuse within religious institutions have proliferated throughout Europe, North America and Australasia. This article examines the role that news media discourses might play in supporting this trend. Taking Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse as a case study, I compare how news media constructed its precipitating issue of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church at two different points in time: the period surrounding the announcement of the Royal Commission and a period 10 years earlier when calls were made for a Royal Commission that were not actualised. I find that in the decade before the Royal Commission’s establishment news media deemed the Church capable of and responsible for delivering justice, and as such licensed it to respond to allegations of abuse internally. In the period surrounding the Royal Commission’s establishment, however, the Church was rendered complicit and had lost its authority to manage the issue internally, while the State had become marked as responsible for recourse instead. This suggests that the emergence of the Royal Commission was imbricated in broader discursive shifts regarding which institution was attributed the right and responsibility to respond. These findings both indicate that news media discourses may play a role in facilitating or inhibiting the emergence of public inquiries and also raise critical questions about the consequences of a discursive shift that centres the State as responsible for and capable of delivering justice in the aftermath of institutional child sexual abuse.

Legal regulations of the body produce and seek to protect specific imaginations of the body in an idealized form—that is, not only what a body is but also what it ought to be. In this article, we apply a queer criminological approach to interrogate the regulation of the body-that-ought-to-be that has animated two legal interventions regarding body modification: the criminalization of female genital cutting (FGC), often described in law as female genital mutilation (FGM), and the regulation of gender-affirming manual hormone use. By analyzing discourses that have circulated in Australian law regarding both practices, we show how the legitimacy of a given body modification has been tied to that modification’s potential to either threaten or affirm a body’s capacity to produce intelligible gender. We contend, on this basis, that the body that the law has sought to protect in these instances is a body that is not queer.

Law & Society ReviewVolume 52, Issue 1 p. 278-280 Book Review Discourse, Identity, and Social Change in the Marriage Equality Debates. By Karen Tracey. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Matthew Mitchell, Matthew Mitchell School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of MelbourneSearch for more papers by this author Matthew Mitchell, Matthew Mitchell School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of MelbourneSearch for more papers by this author First published: 23 January 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12319Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume52, Issue1March 2018Pages 278-280 RelatedInformation

This paper studies the optimal design of unemployment insurance in an environment where the insurance agency could monitor neither the searching efiorts nor the asset holding of an unemployed worker. Previous results with no hidden trade violate the Euler equation of a worker and thus can not be implementable if he has private access to asset market. We abandon the traditional flrst-order approach and solve the incentive problem directly. With CARA utility functions, we obtain the optimal contract in closed form. We flnd that, counter-intuitively, an unemployed worker's consumption will decline faster than that implied by Hopenhayn and Nicolini (1997).