ABSTRACT
The central questions asked by feminist scholars concern the place of sex/gender relations in the shaping of crime, justice, and criminology. With the second wave of the women's movement in the 1970s, scholars who took feminist perspectives challenged the male-centeredness of the field. Major shifts occurred in feminist thinking during the 1990s: Greater emphasis was placed on differences among women, representations of women and gender, and different epistemologies in knowledge production. This led to two developments: First, there emerged a proliferation of ways to relate sex/gender to crime and justice system practices, which have been collectively, though reluctantly, called "feminist criminologies". Second, there was recognition that criminology may be an unhelpful starting point from which to analyze how gender shapes crime and justice. Feminist scholars are more likely to begin with theories of sex/gender, applying these to crime and criminal justice, than to begin with theories of crime from mainstream criminology.
