ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a thumbnail sketch of the ways that criminologists working in the late 20th and early 21st centuries have explained girls’ and women’s violence, which we call gender violence, as it relates to histories of racism, sexism, and classism. The vulnerable femininity argument, which was rooted in feminist theories of crime developed in the 1980s through the early 21st century, looked at the gender-specific context surrounding violent girls and women. Multicultural feminist theorists challenged the White-centered assumptions in criminology. They also underscored the matrix of domination that results from intersecting inequalities of race, gender, and class. Racialization under settler-colonialism was central to Weiss G. Karen and Katy’s colonial patriarchy perspective of gender and violence. In criminology, interlocking theories encouraged exploration of the totality of offenders’ and victims’ lives—their lived realities, life histories, and identities—and asked questions about them as racialized, gendered, and classed people.
