ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the gendering of the debate around youth and crime which took place in Britain and elsewhere during the 1990s. It will be argued, drawing on recent theorisations of corporeality, subjectivity and the sexed body, that there exist both continuities and revealing differences in the way in which cultural mappings of a relationship between the masculinities of boys, male youth and crime has historically informed the constitution of specific criminal(ised) subjects and populations. In seeking to surface, in particular, the ways in which the sexed bodies of male youth and boys have been encoded as masculine across a range of discourses, this chapter is about not just the discursive production of the masculine body as ‘dangerous’. It also presents an exploration of those regimes of organisation and disorganisation, regulation and resistance which have, simultaneously, constituted youthful masculinities as the subject of both desire and dread. In the conditions of late modernity/postmodernity what is being reconfigured in a series of debates about boys, male youth and crime is, I shall argue, no less than the ontology of the child itself and, with it, the ‘death’ of childhood referred to above by Blake Morrison.
