1893 - 1993: From La Donna Delinquente to a

Postmodern Deconstruction of the 'Woman

Question' in Social Control Theory

Marie-Andrde Bertrand, Universitd de Montrdal

Dans cet article l"auteur esquisse une rd,ponse ~ la question suivante:" Qu'y a-t-il de
nouveau dans les ~istdmologies, les thdories ou les paradigmes que orientent les
analyses sur la criminalisation des femmes et leur traitement par le syst&ne pdnal?
L'analyse prdsentde se fonde sur un examen extensif des travaux portant sur "/a
question des femmes " produits par des chercheurs-es au Canada, entre 1964 et 1992.
La premi~re partie brosse un portrait des t~mes et des perspectives thdoriques ayant
marqud les dtudes crirninologiques sur les femmes de 1964 a 1988. Dans la seconde
partie, l'auteure ouvre plus largement sa rd,flexion aux travaux portant sur les
femmes et le contr61e social, de 1988 a 1992. Dans la derni~re partie, trois avenues
thdoriques prometteuses sont raises de l'avant: le constructivisme, la perspective du
point de rue des femmes (standpoint) et le postmodernisme.

INTRODUCTION
It is exactly one hundred years ago, in 1893, in Turin, Italy, that Cesare
Lombroso, a physician, and Guglielmo Ferrero, an historian, published
their La Donna Delinquente, La Prostituta e La Donna Normale ~in which they
expounded their theory on the nature of the crimes women commit, the
causes of women's criminal behaviour and the characteristics of women's
'criminal personality.'
According to the authors, the nature of the crimes women commit vary
with their life cycles: women resort to prostitution and infanticide during
their years of fecundity; in the pre-puberty and post-menopause periods,
they indulge in thefts, frauds, poisoning, and other forms of murder.
Women's psychology is structured by maternity while criminal women's
personality is characterized by virile or viriloid traits. Other and more
fundamental determinants of their criminality are to be found in heredity
and epilepsy (as is the case for men), and in passion.
In later editions of La Donna, published after Lombroso's death, we find
interesting considerations on the treatment of criminal women, which, the
authors suggest, should be trusted to 'reformists' and 'educators,' and on
the necessity of softening the legislation on abortion and divorce.
Lombroso and Ferrero's La Donna is often referred to as the epitome of
sexist physiologistic delinquency. Hence, without necessarily consulting
the original work and satisfying ourselves with a second-hand reference,
we often quote the Lombrosian thesis to get a good laugh from our audience
and to display our disdain for crude positivism. Rarely, if ever, do we

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The Journal of Human Justice, Volume 5, Number 2, Spring, 1994

mention the posthumous chapters of the book which deal with the opportunity to change laws that affected women's lives.
For some reasons, the biologism and physiologism of Lombroso have
become the object of our fiercest attacks, while the psychologism and
sociologism of other authors are treated with much leniency, as if positivism and its determinism manifested itself only through biology and physiology.
For instance, we make our listeners laugh at Lombroso but not so much
at another author, W.I. Thomas whose thesis in The Unadjusted Gir is not
any less sexist than that of Lombroso and Ferrero for being rooted in
psychologism.
Appreciative as we are of some of Thomas' pre-interactionist insights,
we seldom mention that he relied on women's 'special' sexuality (which he
described in debasing terms) to explain their criminality. Analogically, we
rarely attack the sociologists of the 1940s and 1950s with even half of the
violence that we reserve for Lombroso and Ferrero; yet, the majority of
them, far from avoiding the pitfalls of positivism, located the causes of
women's crime and girls' 'sexual delinquency' in urbanization, poverty,
working mothers, out-of-wedlock motherhood, the parents' alcoholism,
and the like. Their sophisms and class biases did not prove more helpful to
the construction of a theory of social control than the biologism,
physiologism, and psychologism that prevailed 50 years earlier.
But the question now is: how innocent are we of the same epistemological
mistakes? One hundred years later, where do we stand in our attempts to
understand the relationships of women to the criminal justice system? What
is new in the epistemologies, theories, and paradigms that we use in our efforts to
account for the criminalization of women and their "treatmentby the penal system?
H o w well (or better) do our present theories and methodologies serve the
object of our inquiry?
In the present essay, I offer answers to these questions and then suggest
some of the directions for our future work.
THE QUESTION OF WOMEN IN CANADIAN
CRIMINOLOGY FROM 1964 TO 1989
The first part of this essay has to do with the works of Canadian criminologists (i.e. professors and researchers in Canadian centres of criminology),
on the 'woman question' from the birth of criminology in Canadian
universities in the early 1960s until 1989.
In the first thirty years of its existence, what has Canadian academic
criminology said on the subject of women, be it women and crime, or
women and deviance, and more generally, on the 'woman question' from
the vantage point of social control? H o w did Canadian criminologists
theorize about women?
In a study conducted from 1988 to 1990, 3we identified 206 works written
from 1964 to 1989:*articles, books, and research reports dealing specifically

45

Marie-Andrde Bertrand
Table 1 : The Subject or Problem Studied

Category of Objects

'Criminal women'
Imprisoned women
Objects of post-penal measures

72
15
2
89

35.0
7.3
1.0
43.3

Victims in general
Sexually assaulted
Battered

7
18
15
40

3.4
8.7
7.3
19.4

30

14.6

30

14.6

Deviants in general
Drugs and alcohol-related cases
Prostitutes
The homeless

8
3
13
2
26

3.9
1.5
6.3
1.0
12.7

Subjects of legislation

21
21

10.2
10.2

206

100.0

Agents of the system

Teachers, researchers in criminology
Others

TOTAL

with the 'woman question' in Canadian criminology - a questionable and

vague expression (the ' w o m a n question') but one which would allow us to
deal with works spreading over a period of theoretical and semantic
heterogeneity. To trace that 'production", we had written to the 125
professors (12 % women) teaching a n d / o r doing research in the 7 university
centres, schools, and departments of criminology in the country, asking
them to report their contribution on that topic.
The objects or problems studied in the works that we traced are summarized in Table 1.
In Table 1, one sees that nearly one half of the works written from 1964
to 1989 focus on women as criminals (43.3%). That category is made of three
different sub-groups: criminal women per se (35% of the total), women in
prisons (7.3%) and women as objects of post-penal measures (1%).
Our second category is the one which deals with women as victims which
can also be subdivided into three categories: victims in general (3.4%),
sexually assaulted women (8.7%)and battered women (7.3%).
Then comes the group of studies on women as agents of the criminal justice
system which we combined with women as agents in the educational and

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The Journal of Human Justice, Volume 5, Number 2, Spring, 1994

Table 2: The Subject or the Problem from 1964 to 1988

Category of
Objects

1964-78
N
%

1979-82
N
%

1983-85
N
%

'Criminal women'
Imprisoned women
Objects of postpenal measures

23 52.3

22 51.2

26 44.8 18 29.5 89 43.2

Victims in general
Sexually assaulted
Battered

10 22.7

7 16.3

11 20.0 12 19.4 40 19.4

Agents of the system

Teachers, researchers
in criminology
Others

8 18.2

5 11.6

Deviants ingeneral
Drugs and alcoholrelated cases
Prostitutes
The homeless

4.5

9 15.6 14 23.0 26 12.6

Subjects of legislation

2.3

8 18.6

44 100.0

43 100.0

TOTAL

2.3

1.5

5.0

1986-88
N
%

TOTAL
N
%

8 13.2 30 14.6

9 14.7 21 10.2

58 100.0 61 100.0 206 100.0

research institutions (teachers or researchers in criminology), altogether

forming 14.6% of our corpus.
A fourth category has to do with the works on women as deviants which
represent 12.7% of the total. The sub-categories here go as follows: 3.9%
deviant w o m e n in general, 1.5% w o m e n involved in drugs and alcohol
related problems, 6.3% w o m e n as prostitutes, and 1% homeless w o m e n
and vagrants.
The last category is the one that concerns the works on women as subjects
of legislation (abortion, etc.): 10.2%.
It is interesting to see the changes over time regarding the relative
importance of these objects of studies. In order to create significant and
comparable groups, we defined four periods of unequal duration but of
comparable volume. Because of the increase in the n u m b e r of professors
and students ('the producers' of our corpus), the periods became shorter as
the years went by. These periods are: 1964-78, 1979-82, 1983-85, and 198688. We did not subcategorize the groups of objects in this case due to a lack
of sufficient numbers.
Table 2 shows the change in the relative importance of the categories of
objects studied as time goes by. The changes that are the most striking deal
with two categories.

Marie-An&& Bertrand

47

Table 3: Theoretical Orientations

Theoretical orientations

Positivism

54

26.2

Interactionism

12

5.8

128

62.1

0.5

11

5.4

206

100.0

Critical theories
(Marxism, neo-Marxism,
social control theory,

the'orie de la rdaction sociale,

feminist theories)
Abolitionism
Others
TOTAL

The absolute number being comparable from period to period, we see

that the percentage of studies devoted to 'women as criminals' decreased
from 52.3% in the first period (1964-78) to 29.5% for the last (1986-88).
Conversely, the percentage of studies focussing on 'women as deviants'
went from 4.5% for the first period to 23% for the last. The interest in
studying women as 'subjects of legislation' dearly increased over the years
(only I such study in the first period as opposed to 9 during the last one).
The other sub-categories remained relatively stable. The evolution in the
choice of objects of research a n d / o r in their 'naming' is indicative of
changes in the intellectual and political concerns of academic criminologists.
Table 3 is a global and static summary of the tendencies at work in the
production under analysis. It has to do with the theoretical orientations that
inspired the authors in their work on women.
In order to validate our interpretation of the orientations of the authors
we used the panel method in the analysis of their works and controlled our
interpretations using the authors' own words as often as possible. In fact,
we had conducted in-depth and on site interviews with 23 authors whose
productions on the woman question were the most considerable (in number
and in terms of publishing over a number of years indicating that the author
had a lasting interest in the subject).
Table 4 illustrates the change in theoretical orientation over the years.
We see in Table 4 the decreasing influence of positivism and the increase
in the presence of critical perspectives in the works dealing with the woman
question, a change most probably reflecting what was generally happening
in the entire field of criminology.
We looked for the presence of a feminist perspective in the works being
studied, referring there again to the word s of the authors themselves on that
matter. Table 5 shows that in only one half of the works under study did
we find feminist theorization at work, although these works dealt specifically with women and the criminal justice system.

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The Journal of Human Justice, Volume 5, Number 2, Spring, 1994

Table 4: Historical Evolution of the Use of Theoretical Paradigms

Theoretical
Paradigms

1964-78
N %

Positivism
Interactionism
Critical theories
Others

19
4
18
3

1979-82
N %

35.2 14 26.0
33.3 4 33.3
14.1 24 18.8
25.0 1 8.3

1983-85
N %

12
3
37
6

1986-88
N %

TOTAL
N %

22.2
9 16.7 54 100.0
25.0
1 8.3 12 100.0
28.9 49 38.3128 100.0
50.0
2 16.7 12 100.0

Table 5: Presence or Absence of a Feminist Perspective

Feminist Perspective

Absence or near absence

95

46.1

Presence

111

53.1

TOTAL

206

100.0

Table 6: Presence of a Feminist Perspective According to

Theoretical Orientations

Theoretical
Orientation

Positivism
Interactionism
Critical criminologies

Absence
of a Feminist
Perspective
N
%

38
4
46

70.4
33.3
35.9

Presence
of a Feminist
Perspective
N
%

16
8
82

29.6
66.6
64.1

TOTAL
N

54
12
128

100.0
100.0
100.0

A cross-analysis of the data on theoretical orientations in general (Table 3)

and feminist perspective (Table 5) shows that, for a feminist analysis, works
inspired by critical theories are more hospitable than those relying on the
positivist paradigm (Table 6).
In fact, what Table 6 shows clearly is that a feminist orientation is more
rarely found in works written from a positivist perspective, s Yet some
authors who had worked mostly from a positivist perspective (without
questioning the data or the concepts) were becoming aware, toward the end
of their article, book, or report, that their results called for a critical
assessment of the gender differential. They then usually used some of the
insights of liberal feminism to explain gender discrimination.
As for the relationship between 'critical' and 'feminist,' it is neither a
simple nor a one-way one. While some interviewees mentioned that before
they had embarked into the w o m a n question, their work in general had
already been inspired for some time b y one or another critical perspective
(Marxism or neo-Marxism, social control theory, sodal reaction, etc.) and
that they had used their 'old' critical lenses (plus some insights from
feminist theories) in their work on women. Others said that they had

Marie-Andrde Bertrand

49

become 'critical' of previous theories because of what they saw in their

works on women. For the latter, feminist theory was, so to speak, their door
of entry into critical thinking.
WORKS ON WOMEN AND SOCIAL CONTROL
PUBLISHED IN CANADIAN SOCIAL SCIENCE
JOURNALS FROM 1989 to 1992
In part two of this essay, I will analyse a more recent corpus of literature on
women and social control, also from Canadian sources.
Our knowledge on crime, social control, deviance, and the criminal
justice system is not limited to what is produced in departments and
schools of criminology. It also originates in departments of sociology and
anthropology, in faculties of law, in departments of history, especially in
those Canadian universities where there is no department of criminology,
not to mention units of research located in governmental and other offices.
In order to up-date and widen, even if incompletely, m y review of the
works on the criminalization of women, I searched the most recent articles
(1989-1992) in the major Canadian journals that allocate space for social and
human scientists writing on the issue of women and criminal law. These
indude: The Canadian Journal of Criminology, The Journal of Human Justice,

Criminologie, Ddviance et Socidtd, Women and Criminal Justice, Social Justice,

Histoire Sociale/Social History, la Revue Femmes et Droit/Canadian Journal
Women and the Law, la Revue Canadienne droit et Socidtd/The Canadian Journal
of Law and Society, Les Annales internationales de criminologie, Sociologie et
socidtds, and Feminist Issues. In these journals for the years indicated, I
reviewed all of the articles pertinent to my subject, found an interesting
collection of works, and from there, using the references as a method of
snow-bailing, I identified other pertinent works. The corpus that I present
is not an all-indusive review of the 'productions' of the last years on the
subject of women and social control in Canadian scientific journals. Yet, !
think that it is a valid representation of the tendencies at work, the disciplines
involved, and the subjects and themes that have become the foci of interest.
Table 7 sums up m y findings. 6
The first section of Table 7, 'criminalization of particular behaviours,'
comprises works by historians (Cliche 1988, 1990; L6vesque 1989) and one
by a sociologist whose first training was also in history (Th6or~t 1992). All
of these works demonstrate the constructed and ephemerous character of
the criminal legal qualification of the behaviours that are particular to
women, and the political, economic and moral factors involved in the
definition of women's 'problems.' The article by Lowman (1990) uses
ethno-anthropological observations to illustrate the disparities in the application of the law in cases of prostitution, depending on the class and gender
of the person suspected or accused.
In section two, 'medicalization of particular physiological states of
women,' though we see only one recent work by a Canadian author I
deemed it worthy of mention, since there is now a growing amount of

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The Journal of Human Justice, Volume 5, Number 2, Spring, 1994

Table 7: Overview of Recent Works on Women and Social Control

by Canadian Authors 1989-1992

Subje c t s

Topics

Authors

Criminalization
of particular
behaviours
specific to women

matern, out of wed.

contraception
girls' sexual
delinquency
prostitution
infanticide

Cliche 1988
Cliche 1990
L6vesque 1989
Th6or6t 1992
Lowman 1990

Medicalization
PMS
of women's
physiological states
Prisons for women population and
programs policy
Penal process

Kendall 1991

Women victims

Currie 1990
Faith 1989
Faith et al. 1990
Bertrand 1991

battered women
native women

Hamelin 1989
Biron 1992
Roberts and Pires 1992
Roy 1990
Fagnan 1992

Pornography

criminalization of

Lacombe 1991

Critique of
Critique of
the use of
Critique of

the norm

L6vesque 1989
Poff 1990
Snider 1992
Gavigan 1988
Chunn and Gavigan 1988
Currie and Kline 1991
Bertrand 1991a, 1992, 1992a

Critique of the

penal law
the concept of
social control
theories and
epistemologies at
work in criminology

literature using that critical line in the United States., Australia, and
elsewhere, as can be seen in recent issues of Women and Criminal Justice and
SocialJustice7 The medicalization and pathologization of conditions lead to
the d i s e m p o w e r m e n t of the people whose condition is medicalized; it
legitimates the state's control over them; in turn, pathological and medical
conditions can be, and often are, defined as socially dangerous, criminogenic,
and criminal (Kendall 1991).
Under 'prisons,' what we see is the work of feminists who decrypt the
male and sexist character of the structural aspects of prisons, their architecture, their programming, and the denial to w o m e n inmates of decent and
m o d e m programs of general and vocational education. The critique of the
authors goes on to question some 'reformist' changes in the programs of
prisons for women: w o m e n inmates, it says, are n o w 'allowed' to have their
children with them 'if they have attended parental guidance courses' and
if they are good inmates. Some critics point out that while w o m e n on the

Marie-An&de Bertrand

'31

inside are treated as mothers if they happen to have very young children,
and are allowed to attend to them and have special regimes to do so at the
exclusion of all other occupations in the prison, mothers on the outside are
fighting for day care and the right to get employment in all sorts of
(interesting) occupations. Hence, the critics here note the discrepancy
between what is expected or even allowed as a privilege in the case of the
detainees as compared to the present day roles and functions of women in
normal s e d e t y (Hamelin 1989; Biron 1992).
The works in the 'penal process' section (especially the article by Roberts
and Pires) use penal trajectories as the main target of analysis to demonstrate the unevenness of the chances of indictment and the discrepancies in
treatment, i.e. the differences in the ways people are processed according
to their economic, social, and ethnic conditions. In their article, what
Roberts and Pires (1992) bring forth is the perverse and discriminatory
effect of the present definition of sexual aggressions. The new definition of
the offence, sexual assault instead of rape, and the new procedural rules,
have neither really brought about an increase in the number of actual
rapists being convicted nor has it alleviated the pain of the victim during the
criminal justice trial. Furthermore, it has not contributed to a decrease in the
selectiveness of the process. Shirley Roy's (1990) thesis on 'gender as the
fundamental criterion for determining the form of social control' (especially regarding incarceration) is a remarkably well-structured and logical
analysis. As for Fagnan (1992) who, like Roy, works with the concept of
penal trajectories, what she finally renders obvious is the insignificance of
the majority of the accusations brought against women, the inappropriateness of a "penal treatment" for the "problems" encountered, the lack of
resources at the Court level, and the obscurity and absurdities in the court
functioning. Their work, like that of Pires and Roberts (1992), is strongly
anchored in the analysis of the process and its selectivity.
Under 'women victims,' we have works on battered women (Currie
1990), and on Native women (Faith et al. 1990) which bring forth a critique
of the limits of criminal law in the delivering of 'justice' to these women
victims (Faith 1989), and a critical feminist commentary published after the
Polytechnique shooting (Bertrand 1990).* That shooting, we all recall, was
especially directed against women and 'feminists' who are entering men's
professions and taking men's place. The artide analyzes police discourse
and the psychiatrist's reaction to the event as they became known through
the media. It shows that the male discourse, whatever its source, tended to
present the killer as an absolutely unique case and the act itself as absurd.
In the section on 'pornography,' Lacombe's (1991) work is a sociopolitical analysis a/a Foucault of the representational power of obscene
publications, especially those involving women and girls, but also, and
even more so, a critical assessment of criminal law reform and feminists
claims in that matter. The same author (Lacombe 1988) had written a
critique of the use of criminal law again st prostitution as part of her master' s
thesis in 1988.

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The Journal of Human Justice, Volume 5, Number 2, Spring, 1994

The works of the next sections, 'critique of the penal norm and the
criminal law,' 'critique of the concept of social control' and, finally, of
'criminology' itself, go to the roots of the problems of theorization. Feminist
authors signal, among other things, the limitation of the concept of social
control and some of them revise their position v/s a v/s the use and utility
of penal law to defend women against their aggressors, particularly Snider
(1992). Social control as a concept marks a progress in our theorization
process and keeps us away from the legal definition of crime and the
positivityof crime and criminality concepts. Butit has its limitation and its
ahistoricity becomes apparent especially (though not only) when one tries
to use it in the context of women and criminal law.
Finally, in the last section, we see the beginnings of a meta-analysis of the
theories at work in criminology and some articles exposing the advantages
of alternative ways of approaching our objects of study (Currie and Kline
1991; Bertrand 1991a, 1992, 1992a).
One can see from this review of the most recent works that, as time goes
by, the authors are moving further and further away from the legal and
positive definition of crime and criminality; we are seeing an increasing
number of works analyzing the process of criminalization and showing the
selectivity of that process. The use of the notion of social control allows for
the study of constraints other than those coming from the criminal justice
system. In the case of women, the possibility of getting at familial, medical,
and psychiatric controls is very important. We know that many more
women than men are controlled through family, health, and welfare state
apparatuses, and we also know how effective these controls are. The
artificiality of an analysis limiting itself to criminal justice, if one wants to
understand how women are controlled, has become obvious to the researchers whose works are signaled in Table 7.
These recent works are definitely feminist in orientation and much more
clearly so than the ones in the preceding periods. One might attribute that
change to the fact that feminist theories have much more to offer (than they
did in the 1970s and even in the early 1980s). But one might also think it is
the new formulations of the questions themselves - the criminalization of
women instead of women's criminality; the social control of women instead
of the treatment of women under the criminal justice system - that render
possible or easier a feminist questioning. And in turn, that new formulation
is possible because criminology and social control theory are inspired by
new epistemologies, namely constructivism, standpoint theory, and
postmodernism. However, some authors think that it is precisely the
woman question that has been one of the strong forces behind the recent
progress in criminological theory, as we will see later.
In short, what we see happening lately, regarding the woman question
in social control, is the historical reconstruction (and hence relativization)
and the sociological deconstruction (allowing the emergence of the original
meanings of words and functions of institutions) of these 'hard facts,'
norms, concepts (crime, criminal, criminality, even deviance) on which
much of criminology had rested for years.

Marie-Andrde Bertrand

53

PROMISING AVENUES FOR OUR WORK

ON WOMEN AND SOCIAL CONTROL

There is no question in m y mind (nor in the mind of many, or nearly all, of

the authors who have published on women and social control in recent
years) that it is through the use of an epistemology that postulates the
constructed and constructing character of our knowledge, language, laws,
norms, and social problems that we are able to de-positivize, de-naturalize,
d e - e s s e n t i a l i z e c r i m i n o l o g y , social c o n t r o l , and the p r o c e s s of
criminalization. We have seen constructivism at work in the majority of the
articles mentioned above (Table 7) and its liberating effects.
But there are m a n y constructivisms, some more problem-oriented than
others, some more theoretical than others. Among the more theoretical, one
must count the radical constructivism of Von Glaserfeld (1985) 9 and the
social-psychology of knowledge of Watzlawick. These authors draw from
phenomenology and hermeneutics, and in some cases existentialism, a
conception of knowledge as 'invented,' 'created' by the human agent. They
profess that none of our notions is a 'match' with reality but only a 'fit' - a
'key' to understand our environment. Language, say these authors, as all
cultural and social representations, is not only man-made but powerfully
structuring. What the authors of The Invention of Reality offer is in fact an
epistemology. Another constructivism, so to speak, is to be seen in the
works of the social problem theorists who help us see the constructedness
of social situations that tend too often to be considered as 'fundamental,'
'natural,' 'eternal,' 'essential,' and of social problems that 'happen' to be
defined as such as the result of a particular process at a definite moment in
time.
Sometimes, the use of one single word illuminates the constructed
character of the 'problem' studied and suffices to deconstruct an otherwise
taken for granted 'fact.' A good example of this is the title given by Danielle
Laberge (1992) to her overview of the research on women's criminality for
the Annales internationales de criminologie published in a different version in
The Journal of Human Justice (Laberge 1991) which is: 'Women's Criminality,
Criminal Women, Criminalized Women?' The juxtaposition of the three
words has a pedagogical effect on the reader who is questioned as to the
validity of the current expressions 'women's criminality' and 'criminal
women.' Without transforming the intention of the authors whom she
reviews, and who most probably do not all share her particular perspective,
Danielle Laberge succeed s in assertingfr0m the s tart her own conviction that
the label of criminal is not a quality of the person but a status conferred upon
someone b y a state-governed process. The choice of words shows the
accidental occurrence and points to the possibility of discretionary power.
Another theoretical cadre that serves the critical needs of feminists as
well as others belonging to minority groups is the 'standpoint perspective.'
That is the perspective from which some of the feminists quoted in Table 7
have worked, as for instance, Laureen Snider and Karlene Faith. In her
most recent application of standpoint epistemology to the women's condition, Sandra Harding (1991) shows that the use of the standpoint epistemol-

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The Journal of Human Justice, Volume 5, Number 2, Spring, 1994

ogy in her theorization on women has made her come to understand the
condition of other minorities, and she is now involved in eurocentricism
and neo-colonialism. That is a welcome answer to the questions of critics
of standpoint feminism who see in it a potential for a reversal of domination
and a form of essentialism. We have seen (Table 7) feminists like Karlene
Faith working from that perspective and rendering visible the doubly
dominated position of Aboriginal women.
I could not be more in agreement with Donna Haraway (1988), Mary
Hawkesworth (1988), and Hilary Rose (1987) in their respective studies
influenced b y the standpoint perspective: all knowledge being socially
situated, says Haraway, the "dominated' ones have to generate, from their
own experience, individual but above all collective (Hawkesworth), their
'knowledge.'
Yet the critics are correct: the standpoint perspective, because of its
proximity to realism and materialism, is at risk of falling into essentialism
and determinism; it is often forgetful of the power of culture and representations. Among the epistemologies of representation, the "postmodern
perspective' is, I think, very useful. One of the reasons for this is that
postmodernism, in its rejection of the universal, the essential, the ontological, is eminently open to difference. I concur with Jane Flax (1991), a critic
of postmodernism, who, despite this, sees its potential: postmodernism,
she writes, denounces "a misrepresentation of the real that necessarily
entails the suppression of difference (the violence of metaphysics).'
Among the recent works done by Canadians on the woman question in
criminology (Table 7), we see instances of the use of the postmodern
perspective in the writings of Dany Lacombe on pornography, and in those
of Shirley Roy. For instance, Dany Lacombe proceeds to a careful 'reading'
of the debates on the issue of pornography and a deconstruction i /a
Foucault of the political and moral mandates of the commission looking
into the 'problem.'
CONCLUSION
Among the many reefs between which we feminists, and more generally
people concerned with the fate of some oppressed categories, have to sail
in our attempts at understanding the varieties, the effects, and the power of
social controls, there is the temptation to re-essentialize our condition
under, for instance, a catch word like patriarchy or sexuality, or to renaturalize and epitomize maternity, motherhood, and the particular physiological conditions that are ours (menstruation, pregnancy, menopause).
The suggestion of the postmodernists is to pay more attention to the other
differences, other than ours, and put more faith in the power of discourse
and representation, hence in the changes achievable through our discourse.
Feminist theorization, as we can see, has made considerable progress in
the last years. And if we are to believe Stanley Cohen, feminism and
feminist theory have done more for criminology than the latter has ever
done for feminism: the author writes that the way feminism has used

Marie-Andr& Bertrand

55

d e c o n s t r u c t i o n i s m a n d p o l i t i c a l l y t h e w a y it r e s o l v e s t h e t e n s i o n s b e t w e e n
t h e o r y a n d p r a c t i c e is ' m o r e c o n v i n c i n g ' t h a n w h a t h a s c o m e f r o m g e n e r a l
critical theory. 1~

NOTES
1 The first English edition appeared the same year, 1893. London, Fisher Unwin.
2 The work was first published in 1923. I am quoting the 1967 edition. New York,
Harper and Row.
3 The study was undertaken with a grant from the Social Science and Humanities
Research Council of Canada and another one from the Quebec foundation, Formation de chercheurs et avance~nent de la recherche (1988-1990). It is reportedin three
volumes available through the author of this essay. The research team was composed
of Louise L. Biron, co-director of the project; Andr~e B. Fagnan; Raymonde Boisvert;
Chantal Lavergne; Julia McLean; research assistants; and myself, director of the
project.
4 That is, from the birth of academic criminology in Canadian universities to the years
of our project.
5 However, one should be aware that feminism is itself a form of criticism.
6 A preliminary version of that Table and a different version of the commentary that
follows are to be found, in French, in a section (p.7-11) of my presentation at the SaintJovite Congress of the Association of Canadian Studies, September 1992. The
Congress was on The State of Theory in the Canadian Intellectual Community. My own
presentation had to do with: 'Le pouvoir des th~ories f~ministes dans la transformation de la criminologie et plus g6n~ralement dans la reconsid6ration radicale des
theories d u contr61e social" (21 pages, 2 tables). The Association will publish the
proceedings of the Congress.
7 See, for instance, Lisa Maher (1990). The two consecutive issues of Women and
Criminal Justice, 3 (1). 1991; and 3 (2). 1992., on 'The Criminalization of Women's
Bodies,' contain many articles on the same subject. One of them (Maher 1992) is
particularly pertinent.
8 A French version of Bertrand's (1990) also appears in 1990 in Socio/og/eet soc/dtds,22
( 1 ) : 193-197
9 There is an English edition of Von Glaserfeld (1985) under the title: The Invention of
Reality. Von Glaserfeld's contribution is chapter 1 pages 19-42 of the French edition.
It is titled: 'Introduction to a Radical Constructivism."
10 'Intellectual Scepticism and Political Commitment: The Case of Radical Criminology.' Premiere Conference Bonger, Amsterdam, 1990. Texte polycopi6.

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