Imagining Crime: Textual Outlaws and Criminal Conversations Book

This book offers an original and challenging reading of the `crimino-legal complex' - criminology, criminal justice, criminal law, the media and everyday experiences - in the light of cultural studies and feminist theory.Through an exploration of the crisis engendered by the failure of the crimino-legal complex to solve the problems of crime and criminality, Alison Young exposes the cultural dimension of its institutions and practices. She analyzes the far-reaching effects of the cultural value given to crime, showing it to be rooted in a powerful nexus of the body, language, the community and everyday life.Imagining Crime examines a number of key events and issues which have signalled shifts in the representation of crime. These include: criminology's resistance to feminist intervention; the pleasures of reading detective fiction; ambiguities of victimization and social justice in the city; sacrificial structures in the law's response to conjugal homicide; policing the ethnicity of the `illegal' immigrant; defensive responses to the limits of representation in the Bulger affair; the governmental strategies of campaigns against single mothers; and the fatalism of the spectacle of HIV//AIDS in criminal justice policy. Innovative and accessible, Imagining Crime integrates questions in criminology, criminal law and criminal justice with feminist theory, socio-legal studies and cultural studies. It is invaluable reading for students and scholars of criminology, socio-legal studies, criminal law and cultural studies. Imagining Crime examines a number of key events and issues which have signalled shifts in the representation of crime, and offers an original and challenging reading of the `crimino-legal complex' - criminology, criminal justice, criminal law, the media and everyday experiences - in the light of cultural studies and feminist theory.Read More