MODULE 9 LECTURE
Masculinity and Crime
Assessment Reminder
1. 3B – Final Essay/Report – 1500 words 35% | Week 11:
Sunday 23 January by 11:59 pm
2. Journal Entry 3 – 400 words – 15% | Week 12: Sunday 30
January by 11:59 pm
WHAT TRAITS
| DO YOU |
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IDENTIFY WITH
MASCULINITY?
Cultural Reinforcement Of Hegemonic
Masculinity
• Hollywood and Disney has valorised and constructed hegemonic
masculinity through action blockbusters and characters who achieve
success through domination.
• How movies teaches manhood:
https://www.ted.com/talks/colin_stokes_how_movies_teach_manhood?refer
rer=playlist-how_masculinity_is_evolving
• One under-researched area has been the link between hegemonic
masculinity, military and prisons.
MASCULINITY
Sociology of deviance scholars and later
criminologists have been persistently concerned with
what is referred to as the ‘maleness of crime’.
This refers to the recognition that male offenders
commit the vast majority of crime.
Arrest, self-report, and victimisation data consistently
demonstrate that men and boys are the most
common perpetrators of both conventional crimes,
as well as more serious and violent crimes, rather
than women and girls.
EARLY
MASCULINITY
• Early accounts in criminology, did not ask what it
was about men that resulted in disproportionate
involvement in crime.
• Relied heavily on essentialist frameworks for
explaining differences between men and women’s
offending.
• Emphasises the ‘essential’ or ‘natural’ differences
between the capacity and constitution of men and
women (Lombroso & Ferrero 1895; Gault 1932;
Reckless 1961).
MASCULINITY
• Early essentialist accounts emphasised the
average differences in size and musculature
between the sexes as the primary reason for men’s
higher rate of crime in comparison to women.
• Early accounts such as these conflated ‘sex’ with
‘gender’
• Crime, was considered an ‘essential’ or ‘natural’
characteristic of men
CRITICAL MASCULINITIES THEORY
• Little consideration to the role of ‘masculinity’ as a social construct for
understanding mens’ and boys’ relationship with deviant or criminal
behaviour
• Relied upon an essentialist ‘sex-role’ framework to explain this relationship
• Suggested that boys and girls internalised these sex roles, leading boys to
engage in more delinquent behaviour than girls.
• This perspectives lacked critical commentary on how social behaviours
associated with biological sex were socially constructed
MASCULINITY IS A SOCIAL
PRACTICE, NOT A BIOLOGICAL
STATE
Institutionalised
social practice
and masculinity
’Institutionalised’ refers to the way
that certain beliefs and behaviours
‘occur and recur’ over periods of time
in ways that socially reproduce those
beliefs and behaviours (Giddens
1986).
Masculinities are patterns of social
practice, which are sustained, enacted
and reproduced socially, ‘not only by
individuals but also by groups and
institutions’ (e.g. workplace, schools
etc.)
Within masculinity hierarchies, there is
generally a ‘hegemonic’ form of
masculinity (hegemonic masculinity),
which is positioned and constructed as
the most culturally honoured variation
of masculinity in a particular context.
Masculinity
Hierarchy
Complicit masculinity: most
men who are not embodiments
of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, still
accept it as normative.
Subordinate masculinity: The
position of men excluded from
the benefits of hegemony in
various ways. For example,
some masculinities are not
afforded the same amount of
social prestige.
Protest masculinity: a gender
identity that is characteristic of
socially or economically
marginalised men, whose
perceived claim to masculine
power is contradicted by
economic and social inequ
Masculinity hierarchy
MASCULINITIES AND CRIME
Crime as a ‘resource’ for ‘doing’ masculinity
• Crime as a structured action related to the accomplishment of masculinity was
developed to identify and describe the relationship between ‘doing masculinity’ and
‘doing crime’.
• Men’s resources for accomplishing masculinity vary depending on position within
class, race, age, and gender relations. Under these constraints, crime may be a
‘resource’ to accomplish masculinity in a given situation.
• Accordingly, different crimes are ‘chosen’ as means for ‘doing masculinity’ and for
distinguishing masculinities from each other in different social settings
(Messerschmidt 1993).
Crime as a ‘resource’ for ‘doing’ masculinity
Example: Domestic Violence
https://youtu.be/6ZB8juhgVSU
MASCULINITIES AND CRIME
Masculinity and white-collar crime
• The view that masculine crime solely comprises acts of physical violence has been balanced by
accounts of men’s over-representation in economic, corporate, and political crime.
• Most serious offenders in major white-collar crime are male dominated.
• Illicit opportunities to participate in white-collar crime are gender stratified, because women
generally lack access to positions of sufficient power within organisations, businesses and
corporations to facilitate high-end white-collar crime
MASCULINITY AND
WHITE-COLLAR CRIME
WOLF OF WALL STREET
Masculine patterns of violence
• Many killings are disputes between men about insults to personal honour or aimed
at controlling female spouses.
• Anti-homosexual killings have been linked to young males wishing to establish and
present a hyper-masculine self-image.
• In countries where an aggressive, public masculine culture is celebrated, there are
higher rates of violence against women.
• This violence appears to be a way of asserting a hyper-masculine identity and a
way of presenting a dominating masculine image to the perpetrator, the victim and
his peer group.
Example:
Death Of 5 Women
Filmed Singing In
Rural Pakistan
• http://www.bbc.com/news/world-18343090
• In 2010, a video of five women at a co-ed singing
party in rural Pakistan went viral on YouTube.
These women were simply sitting and singing.
• Court reports showed that these four women
disappeared, but were first held captive, tortured
with boiling water and stones, before being killed.
• The local religious leader of the village ordered
the women at the party to be killed, along with
their families, for dishonouring the tribe
Why is the image of four women filmed
dancing such a threatening image? To
whom would this image be threatening?
Example:
Anti-homosexual violence
• Sydney is and has been the site of many gay bashings
and murders.
• Historically, anti-homosexual violence has been underpoliced and under-prosecuted.
• The police have been reviewing 88 gay-hate deaths that
occurred between the 1970s to the early 2000s.
• See: Nguyen, K., 2020 ‘Four other gay-hate crimes being
investigated by NSW Police after Scott Johnson murder
charge’ in ABC News, available at
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-16/scott-johnsoncharge-four-other-sydney-gay-hate-murders/12247922
• What the results found:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3e2qo0Mcbo
Media
representations
of masculine
identities
The joker – uses laughter to avoid displaying seriousness or
emotion
The jock – demonstrates his power and strength to win the
approval of other men and women
The strong silent type (James Bond) – being in charge, acting
decisively, controlling emotion and succeeding with women.
The big shot – power comes from professional status
The action hero – strong and shows extreme aggression and
violence
The Buffoon – a bungling father figure, well intentioned and light
hearted. (Homer). Hopeless at domestic affairs
Complexity Of Masculinity And
Criminalisation
• Contradictory relations exist between criminal masculinities and official state
masculinities.
• The contradiction lies in the fact that masculine violence is sometimes supported
and sometimes denounced or critiqued by the criminal justice system.
• For example, traditional police forces have been heavily masculine and the legal
system still embraces sexist discourses about masculinity and femininity, as
discussed last week.
• Studies have shown that prisons are structured in such a way that prisoners are
dehumanised, and brutalised, enforcing a destructive form of masculine identity.
Conclusion
• Masculinities research is a diverse field of inquiry with many interrelated points of
interest
• The body of work referred to as ‘critical masculinities theory’ coalesces around
several shared assumptions
• Critical masculinities theory shows us that there are ‘multiple masculinities’, not just
one way of being a man
• There are hierarchies of masculinities, often linked to the intersection of masculinity
with class, race and sexuality, which define, and are defined by, the ‘hegemonic’
pattern of a given so
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