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Gendered racial vulnerability: How women confront crime and criminalization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Amber Joy Powell  and
Michelle S. Phelps
Amber Joy Powell*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Michelle S. Phelps
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
*
Amber Powell, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA., Email: powel489@umn.edu
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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.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , September 2021 , pp. 429 - 451
Copyright
© 2021 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

How to cite this article: Powell, Amber Joy, Michelle S. Phelps. 2021. “Gendered racial vulnerability: How women confront crime and criminalization.” Law & Society Review 55(3): 429-451. https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12561

Funding information Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota; Ronald E. McNair Scholarship Program; University of Minnesota's Grant-in-Aid of Research, Artistry, and Scholarship program; University of Minnesota Beverly and Richard Fink Summer Fellowship; University of Minnesota Sociology Department; American Bar Foundation and National Science Foundation, Grant/Award Number: SES-1946670

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