Criticisms

How does cultural criminology romanticize crime?

Romanticising crime

•Cultural criminologists  ‘romanticize’ crime by over-emphasizing the resistant and exciting aspects of deviance

•Fixation on celebratory accounts on ‘subcultural outlaw groups’ (Alison Young, 2008, p. 21), criminal edgework and ‘low-level transgression’

•The overly idealistic confusion of crime and resistance and celebration of (potentially harmful or simply mundane) acts of transgression

Why may cultural criminology be labelled as invalid?

•Hall and Winlow (2015): Cultural criminology places too much emphasis on crime as a symbolic transgression of authority

•It downplays the reality of the harm that some crimes are causing

•Cultural criminology “is not really criminology, it’s the sociology of peripheral mischievousness, and the distinction it makes between this and serious crime and harm is often unclear.” (p. 51)

•By suggesting crime is not such a big problem, the perspective contributes to the neglect of victims of serious crime

What is the feminist critique of cultural criminology?

The feminist critique

•Naegler and Salman (2016): Cultural criminology pays insufficient attention to important dimensions of power around gender, race and sexuality

•Many accounts are written from a masculinist position and operates with a narrow conceptualisation of power and power relations

•Cultural criminologists are overly preoccupied with so-called ‘prototypically masculine, high-risk pursuits’

•The main progenitors of cultural criminology were largely men, and that the focus of most of the early studies were male subjects

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