Gendered racial vulnerability: How women confront crime and criminalization. Issue 3 (30th July 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Powell, Amber Joy; Phelps, Michelle S.
• Is Part Of: Law & society review. Volume 55:Issue 3(2021)
• Page Start: 429
• Page End: 451
• Publication Date: 2021-07-30
• Subjects: Sociological jurisprudence -- Periodicals; Droit; Société; Sociologie du droit; Périodique électronique (Descripteur de forme); Ressource Internet (Descripteur de forme); 340.11505
• DOI: 10.1111/lasr.12561
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0023-9216

Abstract

Abstract: Prior research illustrates how race‐class subjugated communities are over‐policed and under‐protected, producing high rates of victimization by other community members and the police. Yet few studies explore how gender and race structure dual frustration, despite a long line of Black feminist scholarship on the interpersonal, gender‐based, and state violence Black and other women of color face. Drawing on interviews with 53 women in Minneapolis from 2017 to 2019, we examine how gendered racial vulnerability to both crime and criminalization shape dual frustration toward the law. Findings illustrate that police fail to protect women of color from neighborhood and gender‐based violence, while simultaneously targeting them and their families. Despite their spatial proximity to women of color, white women remained largely shielded from the dual frustration of crime and criminalization. Attention to the gendered racial dimensions of dual frustration offers an intersectional framework for understanding women's vulnerability to violence and cultural orientations toward the law.