ABSTRACT

In Making Trouble leading scholars in criminology, sociology, criminal justice, women's studies, and social history explore the mediated cultural dynamics that construct images and understanding of crime, deviance, and control. Contributors examine the intertwined practices of the mass media, criminal justice agencies, political power holders, and criminal and deviant subcultures in producing and consuming contested representations of legality and illegality. While the collection provides broad analysis of contemporary topics, it also weaves this analysis around a set of innovative and unifying themes. These include the emergence of ""situated media"" within and between the various subcultures of crime, deviance, and control; the evolution of policing and social control as complex webs of mediated and symbolic meaning; the role of power, identity, and indifference in framing contemporary crime controversies, with special attention paid to the gendered construction of crime, deviance and control; and the importance of historical and cross-cultural dynamics in shaping understandings of crime, deviance, and control.

part I|22 pages

Introduction

part II|66 pages

Constructions of History and Myth

chapter 2|22 pages

The Elders Were Our Textbooks

The Importance of Traditional Stories in Social Control

part III|88 pages

Constructions of Gender and Crime

chapter 5|24 pages

Predators

The Social Construction of “Stranger-Danger” in Washington State as a Form of Patriarchal Ideology *

chapter 6|26 pages

Media Misogyny

Demonizing “Violent” Girls and Women

chapter 7|16 pages

“The War Against Women”

Media Representations of Men’s Violence Against Women in Australia

chapter 8|20 pages

Detecting Masculinity

part IV|76 pages

Constructions of Subculture and Crime

chapter 9|24 pages

Wild Life

Constructions and Representations of Yardies

chapter 10|28 pages

Punky in the Middle

Cultural Constructions of the 1996 Montréal Summer Uprisings (A Comedy in Four Acts)

chapter 11|22 pages

Freight Train Graffiti

Subculture, Media, Dislocation *

part V|48 pages

Constructions of Policing and Control

chapter 12|22 pages

Reflections

The Visual as a Mode of Social Control

chapter 13|24 pages

Police Homicide Files as Situated Media Substrates

An Exploratory Essay

part VI|46 pages

Constructions of Crime and Terrorism

chapter 14|16 pages

Jihad as Terrorism

The Western Media and the Defamation of the Qu’ran

chapter 15|28 pages

Fighting Terrorism As If Women Mattered

Anti-Abortion Violence as Unconstructed Terrorism

part VII|18 pages

Conclusions and Prospects

chapter 16|16 pages

Taking the Trouble

Concluding Remarks and Future Directions