Postmodern criminology and its feminist discontents

This article examines the work of self-defined exponents of a postmodern" c riminology.This school of critical criminology takes Jack Katz's Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil (1988) as its founda tional text. Because Katz's book focuses on the: sensual feel rather than o n the causes of criminal behaviour, it has been acclaimed as a new and even heroic, post-positivistic approach to criminality. It is neither. Moreover , from any feminist perspective, there is nothing critical about it.The fou ndational concepts of Katzian-inflected "postmodern" criminology are caught in the same universalising, androcentric paradigms which bedevil the posit ivistic criminology it claims to displace.The so-called "postmoderism" whic h is said to inform this new school displays a spectacular ignorance of the conceptual advances made by feminist poststructuralist theorists in a rang e of fields. More broadly, this article aims to show that nothing, and cert ainly not the "postmodernism" of the Katzians, can save criminology as a di scipline. Criminology in its ostensibly post-positivistic and "postmodern" formations is as intellectually and politically bankrupt as the positivism it imagines it transcends.