Abstract
This chapter explores deconstruction within criminology, in order to more fully develop within criminology the more deconstructive and disruptive aspects of queer scholarship. It considers the diversity of existing approaches to deconstruction within criminology, and outlines what queer deconstructive approaches entail. It then discusses some of the limitations of deconstruction within criminology, and argues for a shift towards the activity of critique (understood as a project of opening up possibilities and pushing against limits), which is more in line with queer work, as opposed to criticism (understood as an activity that is premised on judgement), which underpins much existing scholarship.
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Notes
- 1.
However, this cannot be said of all deconstructive work within criminology. For example, deconstruction has been used to label work that offers what amounts to an analysis of legislation (Meloy et al. 2008), work that offers an historical description of change in criminal justice systems (Nash 2000), and it has even been used to label a quantitative test of the assumptions underpinning a general theory of crime (Rebellon and Waldman 2003). The discussion in this chapter will focus primarily on those uses of deconstruction that might be said to align more overtly with critical criminologies and, indeed, with poststructuralism.
- 2.
Notably, the terms ‘rational’ and ‘non-rational’ are themselves left undefined here.
- 3.
There are, of course, other Derridean concepts that form part of deconstructive approaches and which have filled entire volumes. The aspects discussed here offer only an overview of the key tenets of deconstruction and do not define deconstruction in its entirety (Arrigo 2003, 78).
- 4.
Parts of this section have been developed from previous work (see Ball 2014a).
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Ball, M. (2016). Deconstruction and Queering in Criminology. In: Criminology and Queer Theory. Critical Criminological Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-45328-0_7
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