Gender, Heterosexuality, and Youth Violence: The Struggle for Recognition

Gender, Heterosexuality, and Youth Violence: The Struggle for Recognition

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At the empirical level, Messerschmidt provides his readers with a glimpse into the ways in which sex, gender and sexuality interweave in complex and unpredictable ways in the lives of six young white, working-class Americans. At the theoretical level, the book stands as testimony to the co-constitutive nature of gender and sexuality and to the difficulties that are then faced by criminologists in conceptually demarcating these from each other and then using them to inform empirical analyses of crime.

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The Struggle for Recognition

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Messerschmidt's timely and thoughtful book relies on life history methods to illuminate patterns that lead boys and girls to become physically or sexually violent or to behave in deliberately nonviolent ways. The book is organized around physical violence, sexual violence, and nonviolence and features a case-study boy and girl for each chapter. Well grounded in feminist criminology, the use of the voices of young men and women makes the theory come alive.

In addition to the interesting relationships that Messerschmidt Univ.

Gender, heterosexuality, and youth violence : the struggle for recognition

In light of the attention being paid to bullying, this book provides the after story, in addition to suicide, of which everyone is aware: The first two chapters of the book offer an overview of the fields of gender, sexuality, and criminology that will be invaluable for those unfamiliar with the fields. In the stories of the four violent offenders, Messerschmidt makes a strong case for how the notions of hegemonic masculinity, which include dominance, physical strength and active heterosexuality, clearly influenced each young person's choices to engage in acts of violence.

He also provided a helpful analysis of how body size and gender expression subjected these participants to bullying and harassment in their schools and neighborhoods, which then was a primary motivator for them to act out in other ways to demonstrate their masculinity through dominating others physically and sexually. In his unsparing yet sympathetic analysis, James Messerschmidt lays out a continuum of youth violence that embraces everything from schoolyard bullying to sexual assault.

By focusing on commonalities, while remaining sensitive to important differences, Messerschmidt reframes the issue, and thus sets a new agenda for social scientists and criminologists for decades to come.

Gender Reckonings

In this book, Messerschmidt centers sexuality and hetero-normativity in theorizing boys' and girls' use of assaultive and sexual violence. These six life histories of adolescent male and female offenders reveal the interwoven social constructions of gender, sexuality, bodies, and context in life paths that produce repeated violent or sexual offenses. The findings underline the inadequacy of gender analyses alone.

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