Ferreira, Gisella Lopes Gomes Pinto --- "Criminologia Feminista: Teoria Feminista e Criticas as Criminologias [Feminist Criminology: Feminist Theory and Critiques of Criminologies]. Rio de Janeiro: Lumen Juris" [2021] IntJlCrimJustSocDem 62; (2021) 10(4) International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 265

• Book Review

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Book Review

Carmen Hein de Campos (2020) Criminologia Feminista: Teoria Feminista e Críticas às Criminologias [Feminist Criminology: Feminist Theory and Critiques of Criminologies]. Rio de Janeiro: Lumen Juris.

ISBN: 978-65-5510-362-5

Gisella Lopes Gomes Pinto Ferreira

Queensland University of Technology, Australia

The work of the Brazilian professor Carmen Hein de Campos on violence against women (VAW), feminist advocacy and theory are well known in Brazil and Latin America. She might be the most cited scholar in these fields in the country. While she has worked in Anglophone countries and published in English, most of her contributions have predominantly been in Portuguese. It is almost certain that the language barrier and the lack of interest to dialogue with Southern scholars are the main reasons why Campos’ contributions are not widely recognised among Anglophone scholars. To address this imbalance, drawing upon the Southern Criminology Project to democratise knowledge production by including voices from the South (Carrington et al. 2016), I review the latest edition of Campos’ book, Criminologia Feminista: Teoria Feminista e Críticas às Criminologias [Feminist criminology: Feminist theory and critiques of criminologies], which was published in Portuguese.

In 1999, the book Criminologia e Feminismo [Criminology and feminism], edited by Campos, was published. It is considered the first publication to make explicit connections between criminology and feminism in Brazil. Over the past 20 years, Campos has been working with feminist and human rights organisations. The first of these was Themis, which she has been a part of since it was founded in 1993. As a member of Themis, Campos integrated the consortium that proposed the draft bill of the Maria da Penha Law, which is known as one of the best legislations in the world for combatting VAW due to its gendered perspective and integrated model for preventing and responding to domestic and family violence. Campos also coordinated the Committee for Latin America and the Caribbean for the Defense of Women’s Rights in Brazil in 2010. She worked as a consultant in government initiatives, such as the Joint Parliamentary Inquiry Commission of Violence Against Women and the Technical Standard for the Standardisation of Specialised Police Stations for Women in Brazil.

Campos explains that her work in feminist and human rights advocacy and academia shapes her relationship with criminology and feminism. The duality and instability of her ongoing work in these two areas place her in a discomforting position, which is reflected in this book. For Campos, feminists’ relationships with criminology have always been something in which attraction and repulsion are continuously present. She demonstrates that while some feminists like Francis Heidensohn and Loraine Gelsthorpe, and the Latin Americans Rosa del Olmo and Alda Facio recognise the obstacles to working with criminology, they also envision exploring possibilities and connections between criminology and feminism.

Campos observes that while these dialogues between feminism and criminology were developing, new perspectives joined this conversation, including Black feminist, multi-ethnic and queer criminologies. She outlines that these perspectives underscore the need to recognise the existence of ambiguity and fragmentation in the field. As a result, Campos found it crucial to ask: is it possible to have feminist criminology in Brazil? To her, to problematise the existence of feminist criminology does not mean an abandonment of a feminist perspective within criminology but highlight the relative importance of criminology to feminism. Accordingly, the ambiguity and a fragmented view towards this subject seem to be the necessary conditions to develop a feminist perspective within criminology. To this end, Campos embraces two theoretical perspectives in her book: post-modern feminist theory and critical criminology, and post-critical criminology. Yet, she clarifies that when she talks about a feminist theory, she is not referring to a ‘unique’ feminist theory because it does not exist. Similarly, she outlines that there is not only one ‘criminology’. There are different feminist and criminological perspectives. In this book, they are considered a pathway to demonstrating the several faces of feminism and possible interpretations from one or more chosen perspectives.

Campos highlights two main reasons for the prevalence of foreign author citations in her book. One, she agrees with Zaffaroni that there is, in this field, a theoretical deficiency resulting from the process of receiving and translating the theories of ‘foreigners’ to the local context, which often did not escape from the effects of ‘colonialism’. Secondly, Campos emphasises the almost-absent ‘feminist theory in criminology’ in Brazil and Latin America. She understands that the expression of feminist criminology is problematic because of its European and North American origins. However, she argues that the production of knowledge in Brazil in this field has been related to feminist perspectives in criminology and critical perspectives of feminism and criminology. As a result, she argues that feminist criminology in Brazil is still being developed. For this reason, Campos evaluates it as necessary to ‘translate’ and discuss the possibility of having feminist criminology in Brazil. Unlike classic criminology authors, whose works have been widely translated into Spanish and Portuguese, she outlines that feminist critiques and their mainstream work have not received the same treatment. By bringing to light the main deconstructions of criminology theories done by feminists, Campos aims to contribute to making this literature accessible in Brazil. For her, the lack of access to these critiques might be due to a still-incipient feminist perspective in criminology and in the almost-absent feminist critique to our criminology. As a result, without denying the need for translation practices to enhance globalised dialogue, Campos argues that it is necessary to examine if the matrices of criminological thought are compatible with those of the feminist view. For Campos, feminist criminology must be constructed from feminism and not the other way around.

Chapter 1 revisits the main theories that have shaped critical criminology and their lack of discussion around gender.

Chapter 2 explores feminist theories and the deconstruction of two critical political categories of analyses done by feminists: ‘woman’ and ‘sex’. These categories destabilised feminist theories. This debate has a central role in the book, as it seeks to build a feminist perspective in criminology that requires a multidimensional perspective and rejects the centrality of a victimised subject essentially marked by gender. In this chapter, Campos brings the feminist theories and a contemporary discussion from feminist debates to the criminal sciences.

Chapter 3 evaluates the use of feminist theories by legal academics and their impact on the legal field. Campos proposes that this discussion is critical because legal responses were created within this field to protect women. This legal discussion highlights calls for the criminalisation of behaviours that harm women and their human rights, and decriminalisation of existing crimes that limit women’s autonomy, such as abortion. Campos outlines that understanding women’s human rights within feminist legal theories in the country has a significant impact on legal principles and jurisprudence in Brazil.

Chapter 4 evaluates the paradigm shift caused by the feminist critiques of criminology. Firstly, feminists foreground the androcentric character of criminology, and by incorporating gender and feminism in the field, they deconstruct its malestream theories. Yet, orthodox critical criminology has been resisting feminist contributions, and this debate is observed in this chapter.

This book has achieved several milestones. It makes feminist debates from the North accessible in Brazil. Her work is not a simple translation of Northern theories but a critical analysis of them within the criminological and feminist debates focused on the local and diverse context of Brazil and its unique features. One might argue that developing local and Southern theories based on those produced in the North is not the best thing to do. However, it is crucial to remember that we should approach a global dialogue with several sources, regardless of their origins, in a critical manner (Moosavi 2019). Another crucial achievement is Campos’ proposal to design a feminist criminology of resistance from the margins built from the lived experience of women’s struggles. This should include the experiences of poor, Black women living in favelas, lesbians and transgender people, who are categorised as the marginalised in Brazilian criminology. Campos notes that despite more than 40 years of feminist production in criminology, Brazilian criminology is still resistant to embracing feminism. To address this problem, she calls for multiple feminist perspectives that can manage the fragmentation and decentralisation of the subject and are guided by the deconstruction of the heteronormative outlined by feminism and queer studies.

Correspondence: Gisella Lopes Gomes Pinto Ferreira, PhD Candidate, School of Justice, Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. [e-mail]

References

Carrington K, Hogg R and Sozzo M (2016) Southern criminology. British Journal of Criminology 56(1): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azv083

Moosavi L (2019) Decolonising criminology: Syed Hussein Alatas on crimes of the powerful. Critical Criminology 27(2): 229–242. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-018-9396-9

Please cite this book review as:

Lopes Gomes Pinto Ferreira G (2021) Review of Criminologia Feminista: Teoria Feminista e Críticas às Criminologias by Carmen Hein de Campos. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 10(4): 265-267. https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcjsd.2051

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ISSN: 2202-8005