Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 101

Joan W. Moore and Anne Campbell are the first feminist gang scholars. J. W. Moore (1991) warns against sociologists who “treat gangs as if they were totally isolated delinquent phenomena, in fact gang members go to school, and their group is one of many in the school youth-culture setting” (p. 41). J. W. Moore (1991) and A. Campbell (1991) caution against essentializing gangs, regardless of gender, but also in terms of gender. Until Campbell’s work in the 1980s, if gang researchers included women/girls, they were only as afterthoughts in studies on boys/men, and the studies viewed them through sexist, racist, and sexualized lenses (Chesney-Lind & Hagedorn, 1999). Not surprisingly, then, women and girls’ participation in gangs has typically been viewed as an extension of men and boys’ gang membership, with the female gang members viewed as sidekicks and sex objects for the male gang members (see A. Campbell, 1990, 1991; Chesney-Lind & Hagedorn, 1999), where their sexual experiences, pregnancies, and motherhood are used as indicators of their delinquency, while their sexual victimizations (including gang rapes) are presented as consensual experiences (A. Campbell, 1991; Chesney-Lind & Hagedorn 1999). More recent research suggests that “girls in gangs” are more dynamic, independent, and interesting than the criminologists from the 1970s and earlier would have us believe (Belknap & Bowers, 2016; A. Campbell, 1990; Chesney-Lind & Hagedorn, 1999; L. A. Hughes, Botchkovar, & Short, 2019; Laidler & Hunt, 2001; J. Miller, 2001; J. Miller & Brunson, 2000; J. W. Moore, 1991; Wing & Willis, 1997).

At the same time, Panfil and Peterson (2015) note that individuals can gain entrée into gangs through “their familiar or other longstanding relationships,” such as by being “‘born in,’ ‘blessed in,’ or ‘walked in,’” or they can be “‘jumped in,’” wherein they must fight other members of the gang for a designated period of time, but only girls/women are “‘sexed in,’” that is, having sex with male gang members to gain entrée (p. 213). However, they note that this is rare because of the cost that comes with it of being looked down on by other female and male gang members for doing so.

Fishman’s (1999) analysis of the Vice Queens in Chicago in the 1960s reported that although the members would accompany the Vice Kings to their fights and subsequently fight the Vice Kings’ enemy’s auxiliary female gang members, the Vice Queens were far more likely to participate in their own fights with other women gangs, independently of what was going on with the Vice Kings. Most of the fights the Vice Queens engaged in had to do with issues of loyalty and integrity, with integrity involving a “threat to or attack on their public reputation” (p. 75). Notably, “fighting a male, and especially winning, carried a particular status among the girls” (p. 75). Consistent with J. Miller’s (2001) classic study of girls in gangs, L. A. Hughes and colleagues’ (2019) more recent analysis of historic Chicago girl gangs from 1959 to 1962 found their friendship networks were not as close as other girl gang research suggests, and they were in the gang more for peer backup on the streets. The girls’ offenses included some more masculine-associated crimes such as strong-arm robberies and purse snatchings. Also consistent with J. Miller’s (2002) more recent research on girls in gangs, L. A. Hughes and colleagues (2019) reported that while sex was “used to gain favor with boys, we found no evidence of it being valued and rewarded with prestige” among their own gang members (p. 1), and J. Miller (2002) reported also that sex devalued their status in boys’ views.