ABSTRACT
In the context of researching women's lives over the past fifteen years, I have become accustomed to dancing with denial, my description of traditional criminology's myopia when it comes to gender and crime. The purpose of this chapter is to reflect upon my own development as a researcher, and to acknowledge the power of the research process in forming and formulating my view of criminology from a feminist perspective. Researching women's lives forces me now to question men about their lives, and leads me to directly challenge masculinity and its underpinning of the dominant perspectives in criminology. I conclude by encouraging others to contest the imagery of gender in criminology (and any other discipline), an imagery which persists in contradictory portrayals of women, whether as crime victims or offenders, as heartless, helpless, hopeless, and/or in need of protection or isolation by the father-state, and of men, as altruistic protectors of women, savage violators, or themselves untouched by violence. Such imagery can be exposed through research on women's lives, consistently uncovered by feminist research, and can be challenged though a feminist approach to the study of men and crime. 1
