Gendered racial vulnerability: How women confront crime and criminalization.

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 schola...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Law & Society Review Vol. 55; no. 3; pp. 429 - 452
Main Authors: Powell, Amber Joy, Phelps, Michelle S.
Format: Article
Published: Cambridge University Press Sep2021
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Description
Summary: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.