From Patriarchy to Gender: Feminist Theory, Criminology, and the Challenge of Diversity (From Female Gangs in America: Essays on Girls, Gangs and Gender, P 118-132, 1999, Meda Chesney-Lind and John M. Hagedorn, eds. -- See NCJ-184395)

• NCJ Number: 184400
• Author(s): James Messerschmidt
• Date Published: 1999
• Length: 15 pages
• Sale Source: Lake View Press
• Publication Format: Book (Hardbound)
• Publication Type: Issue Overview
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: *This document is currently unavailable from NCJRS.

Annotation

This chapter examines the relationships among gender, race, class, and distinct types of youth crime.

Abstract

For both boys and girls, joining a youth gang represents an idealized collective solution to the experience of class and race powerlessness. Members of youth gangs engage in “male” and “female” crimes as a resource for doing gender and satisfying the needs of the “fast life” on the street. For male gang members, robbery is the most available criminal resource for obtaining money, for constructing a specific type of masculinity and for accomplishing gender and therefore doing difference. For females, prostitution appears to be the principal criminal resource for obtaining fast money as well as doing difference. Gender patterns of crime are not static, but vary situationally. The gang provides a milieu within which girls can experiment with, and possibly dismantle, the bounds of emphasized femininity. Girl gang members use the race and class resources to construct gender and, in so doing, challenge notions of gender as merely difference. Rather than conceptualizing gendered crime simplistically, it is possible to explore which males and which females commit which crimes and in which social situations.