Queer criminology

Queer criminology is a relatively novel term in research on crime and criminal justice, but its origins reflect decades of scholarship and debate about sexuality, gender, deviance and social control. This has stressed that human sexuality has shifting forms and meanings across lives, rather than reflecting innate patterns across culture and history. Yet from the late 1800s' rise of the human sciences and related expert accounts of sexuality, industrial societies increasingly viewed sexuality as an essential core component of individual identity (Weeks 1985). Sexuality became linked to key definitions of pathology and criminality. The sinful sodomite was recast as the "homosexual" - a disturbed species whose sickness marked them out from the rest of society and required intense treatment, regulation and punishment (Foucault 1978). It was then supposed that homosexual and heterosexual identity divided people via the biological sex of their sexual partners. Furthermore, "natural" bodily-grounded heterosexual desire became a further core aspect of understanding gender as masculine and feminine corporeal difference.