SOC219H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Masculinity, Ender Wiggin, Digimarc
Miller- strengths and limitations for doing gender in understanding street crime
This paper is an engagement with Messerschmidt's structured actiontheory, and more generally with fe
minist criminologists' applications of theconcept 'doing gender' for understanding street crime.
Key Words feminist theory crime as structured action James Messerschmidtdoing gender gender dualis
m In recent years, feminist criminologists havedrawn on the concept of situated action to help explain th
e gendered nature ofcrime.
1 Viewing gender as situated action or situated accomplishment meansrecognizing that gender is 'much
more than a role or an individualcharacteristic: it is a mechanism whereby situated social action contribu
tes tothe reproduction of social structure'.
Focusing on situated social action also challenges the notion that 'natural' differences between women a
nd men Miller-
The strengths and limits of 'doinggender' account for gender, gender inequality or gendered action.
First, while the concept of 'gender roles' assumes that 'gender is logically priorto behavior, already settle
d, and can be understood as behavior', the currentapproach recognizes 'gender as something constructe
d in social action, assomething done, accomplished in the everyday actions of social life'.
Given its grounding in the agency/structure nexus, viewing gender as situatedaction means recognizing t
hat there are a multitude of masculinities andfemininities - each shaped by structural positioning - rathe
r than one static setof gender roles.
Accord-
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