Critical attention to the 'man question' has become a hot topic within criminology. Since the emergence of the first wave of feminism debates about men, gender and masculinities have formed a thread of continuity within a diverse body of work that has been characterised as masculinities research. As S. Edwards observes, if feminist theory remains limited in its own applications to the study of men and masculinity, the critical studies of masculinity may offer a more successful alternative, particularly in relation to questions of violence. In her rereading of the story of Oedipus, Teresa de Lauretis observes that 'inscriptions of violence at that' are already woven into its representation of violence. Accordingly, J. W. Messerschmidt investigates how both sexual and assaultive violence by adolescent males against women and other young men 'may be accountable practices for "doing masculinity"'. The challenging of gender norms that characterised the women's movement of the 1970s led to examining men 'as gendered beings'.