ON THE TOPOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION OF CRIMINOLOGICAL REALITY

   by 

Bruce Arrigo

         
         ON THE TOPOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION OF CRIMINOLOGICAL REALITY

ABSTRACT

     Academy scholarship is now increasingly investigating the
     dynamics of gender, race, and class in various institutional
     contexts. Postmodern criminological research is also gaining
     greater attention and respectability in the discipline.
     Notwithstanding both trends, postmodern criminology has not
     yet examined the constitution of criminological theory with
     the intent of identifying how the voice of and ways of knowing
     for women, minorities, and the poor are represented within the
     discourse of theory.  This article represents one preliminary
     step in that direction. At issue is the psychic configuration
     of existing criminological reality. Our method of analysis
     incorporates the conceptual tools of Jacques Lacan's
     psychoanalytic theory, especially his reliance on several
     topological constructs. Our provisional assessment suggests
     that while criminology has offered important insights relevant
     to gender, race, and class, it has essentially failed to makes
     sense of these differences within the discourse of its own
     theory. We argue that this is because the language of
     modernist (and premodernist) criminology is already
     prestructured (psychically encoded) to exclude these
     differences.        

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THIS ARTICLE IS NOW PUBLISHED  in THEORY AND PSYCHOLOGY AS:

Theories of Crime and Crimes of Theorists: On The Topological 219
Construction of Criminological Reality BRUCE A. ARRIGO & T. R.
YOUNG

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•Vol. 8, 1998.    No. 2.February, 1998

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