ABSTRACT
During the past fifteen years there has been a much more sustained focus upon the control of women by the criminal justice system than there had been prior to the mid-1970s. Much of the work that has privileged ideologies of femininity in explaining the differential social controls imposed on women and men has been of an empirical expose kind. One substantive area of study, in which analyses of specific instances of patriarchal domination have been productive, is in the deconstruction of judicial logic in cases of female rape victims and domestic homicides by women. The strength of the best studies that analyze the social control of women within the inter-relationships of the politico-economic institutions of family, marriage and welfare lies firstly in their historical specificity. Post-structuralisms are many, though they all share a "dissatisfaction with the subject as a 'programmed individual'".
