Crime as Structured Action

Doing Masculinities, Race, Class, Sexuality, and Crime

By (author) James W. Messerschmidt

Not available to order

Publication date:

08 August 2013

Length of book:

156 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781442225428

James W. Messerschmidt’s groundbreaking book Crime as Structured Action demonstrates that to understand crime, we must understand how crime operates through a complex series of gender, race, sexual, and class practices. In the second edition of this powerful book, Messerschmidt updates both structured action theory as well as several of the original case studies, and he includes a new case study that further brings structured action theory to life. The book also features expanded discussions of whiteness and sexuality, and their relationships to crime.

Introduction
1: Theory
2: Racist Lynchers
3: Reformed Hustler
4: Murderous Managers
5: Perilous President
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index

It's not enough to note the statistics—that perpetrators of crime are overwhelmingly male. And it's facile and wrong to imply a one-to-one correspondence between norms of masculinity and criminal behavior, since the overwhelming majority of men do not commit crimes (are they not 'real men'?) In this edition of his landmark book, James Messerschmidt develops a theory of gendered crime that is complex enough to embrace the problem, and accessible enough to enable every reader to understand it.