UC Press Blog

The interview below is adapted from a conversation between author Venezia Michalsen and her students on her new book Intersectional Feminist Criminology. Michalsen discusses her motivations for writing the book and the impact she hopes it will have on other Criminology students and scholars.

Venezia Michalsen is Professor of Sociology at Southern Connecticut State University and author of Intersectional Feminist Criminology and Mothering and Desistance in Re-Entry.

Intersectional Feminist Criminology is a pathbreaking book that brings to bear a sweeping body of contemporary intersectional feminist work to disrupt the entire discipline of criminology. Women have been largely absent from criminological theory, research, policy, and practice. This fresh, conversational book critiques the field's dominant theories by analyzing gendered patterns of perpetration and victimization and challenging traditional criminological perspectives on characteristics such as race and queerness. Designed as a rebuttal to conventional criminology textbooks, the book mirrors standard course content through an intersectional feminist lens, offering students a valuable opportunity to question the field's underpinnings and forge a new path to understanding the true meaning of justice.

Venezia: As an introduction, the reason that I wrote this book is because Criminology textbooks usually go through the types of theories, the types of crimes, and then a little bit about the criminal legal system. 

But then that professor has to go through most of class being like, “well, OK, BUT, maybe not exactly. Not for Black people. Not for women. Oh, but what about this theory? OK well it focuses completely on poor people as if rich people never break the law.” 

So, I wrote the book in a way that mirrors the traditional textbooks. I do all the types of theories, then the types of crimes, and then the criminal legal system, and it's just me being critical in every single chapter. The plan is that professors will assign a regular criminology textbook, but then also this book, and so that each chapter will pair up, and they'll do it together so they can spend less time explaining why it doesn't fit for everybody and more time just teaching in class. 

Taylor: What got you into this topic?

Venezia: When I went into the Criminal Justice doctoral program at CUNY, the feminism that I was raised with started clashing with what I kept learning over and over again about punishment and our carceral system — not only that it wasn’t effective, but that it was also super racist, and that while it said it wanted to protect women, it only made abuse of women worse. 

I slowly realized through my education and life experiences that the punitive system I had idealized as a younger person could not fit with my feminism, anti-racism, and the clear and terrible impacts of our carceral system. And then I got very, very lucky. A woman that I was in my doctoral program named Dr. Charlyn Hilliman called me to tell me about an opening as a research assistant at the Women's Prison Association. And so I got that job and met incredible co-workers, learned so much, and got to have a lot of personal interactions with women who are directly impacted with the criminal legal system. 

Finally, becoming a faculty member, I realized that the available Criminology textbooks are so biased about most everything, and I figured that it would be helpful to create the book that I needed for my classes. 

Rose: How would you define “Intersectional feminist criminology” to someone who is not familiar with that concept?

Venezia: Intersectionality is about how our different ways of presenting to the world can come together differently depending on the combinations. So, for example, Black-woman-disabled is different from Black-man-disabled. And that how systems approach those different combinations of identities can shift rather dramatically, even with just one change in those intersections. 

Being an intersectional feminist recognizes that feminism has to embrace all of the differences between people in general, but most of all women. So, you put together intersectional feminism with criminology, and you recognize that our criminal legal system has for so long focused on Black men as criminals, but has hardly looked at the role of women in our criminal legal system, comparatively. How women are victimized so frequently, and how that changes depending on their different intersections. But then also how women are impacted by this mass incarceration of men and how their families, their children, their communities, their homes, are so impacted—we don't talk about that. 

I kept wanting to say, well, what about women? And that's really what this book does, but also making sure to recognize that women are so incredibly diverse in their experiences.  In addition, I believe it is feminist to acknowledge one’s community and foremothers/foresisters: Just to name a few, the book relies heavily on the brilliant and revolutionary work of Black Feminists such as Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks and Audre Lorde, Black Feminist Criminologists such as Hillary Potter, Feminist Criminologists such as Joanne Belknap, Lynn Chancer, Meda Chesney-Lind, Kim Cook, Kathleen Daly, Jeanne Flavin, Lisa Pasko, and abolitionists such as Mariame Kaba and Dean Spade. 

Taylor: What sort of impact do you want your book to have on people who read it?

Venezia: I want people to think critically. I want them to go to a family dinner, and have someone say something untoward, and then feel comfortable saying, “hey, you can't talk that way — if you're going to be at the table, you're going to have to speak in ways that make sense, let's be honest about these things.” I want people to feel equipped with those arguments because sometimes you may feel like — oh, I know that's wrong — but then not know how to support that argument.  So, we want people to be able to put this in their back pocket and be like, “wait, what does the research say?” You know what, here are the facts about being trans, or here are the facts about, you know, Black women being killed by police, or here are the facts about women being police officers or correctional officers being traumatized or the decriminalization of sex work, or prison abolition. 

Rose: Was there any specific chapter that you struggled to write?

Venezia: You guys have all the best questions. I love that. 

A reviewer of the book described the  last two chapters on reform and abolition as being too competitive with each other. And so I went back in and it was hard because the way that I had always thought of it was ‘screw reform, we're going abolish!’  But actually this person was totally right. I had to more accurately portray that abolitionists recognize the importance of this slow movement and these multiple fronts in this resistance against a racist system. So it was hard, but it made it much more accurate and I like it much better now.

Greg: If lawmakers or policymakers saw and read your book, what would be a proposed change that you want that would help women?

Venezia: I think that one of the things is just starting very, very early with more social emotional learning for boys in particular and getting boys to a place so that we will have future generations of men who aren't harming women (or anyone else) nearly so much. So many of our problems are about violence and so much of our violence is done by men — almost all of it is done by men. I think that facing that early on, reminding boys and other male family members that women are human and that we are, you know, just as much human as any men are. 

And it's not just women and men, right? It's all of these different people, disabled people, people of color, women, queer people, it's all about reminding everyone of that humanity of everyone. Feminism isn't just for or about women. Feminism is a way of thinking about all humans by using the idea that women are people. In a society where we treat women as human, everybody is going to do better.

Karina: It's clear you've had many first-hand encounters, whether that be inside or outside of your career, with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. Were there any personal stories or people you came in contact with that you felt compelled to write this book for?

Venezia: There are so many.  I think of my friend Yolanda Johnson-Peterkin, she always walks in the room and she says “Keep Hope Alive!” And if you don't respond with enough enthusiasm, she will get it out of you. But this is a woman who was one of the first five mothers who had her baby while incarcerated at the Rose M. Singer’s nursery program. And then he himself got imprisoned when he got older.  

Yolanda has a master’s degree. She is Executive Director of Housing Initiatives in the NYC Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice. But life is still harder for her — she hasn’t been in prison in decades, but she still feels the impact every single day. People I know who have been in prison are people who have been living law-abiding, happily familied lives for decades that check all the boxes - and still they suffer more than the rest of us. They have so much more burden. Life is just so much more incredibly difficult on an everyday basis and it's just wrong. 

As a white woman who has not lived behind the walls, I want to be a person amplifying their voices. So that people realize that these are real humans, they're awesome, beautiful people who did things, often because of victimization — always, frankly. Everyone I know engaged in activities that broke the law because of their own victimization and it felt just so wrong to me that we fight so hard against what we call child abuse, but then the second that somebody looks too old, we just call them a criminal and put them into a cage for their survival strategies. 

So it feels very important to me to try to amplify the voices of those wonderful women. There's just so much personality in these people. Many are never going to make above minimum wage, many are never going to live in the house of their dreams, many of whom are never going to feel truly and fully safe, and to me that's just bad. That's wrong and we shouldn't do it that way. 

Kristina: You analyze theories so critically. Which theory do you believe ignores and tries to silence feminism? 

Venezia: Almost all of them, but I think the general theory of crime is particularly bad. General theory of crime, if you remember, talks about how there is one thing that explains all crime, which is lack of self-control. And they're a little sneaky about it, but for the most part, they say it's because moms don't teach their boys self-control, and that's why all crime happens. 

To me, it's so incredibly wrong, and especially because almost every single one of these categories of theories completely ignores the fact that women basically don't commit crime.  How do any of these theories get into a book if you can't even explain the behavior of almost 51% of our population? 

The sort of flip of your question — I would say that strain theory actually does a pretty good job of explaining both women and men's crimes if you take into account Broidy and Agnew’s “gendered strain theory.” But gendered strain theory fizzled and died, likely just because it was talking about gender. 

So I ask: Why don't we switch over to talking about the people who aren't breaking the law? I mean, fine, women are breaking traffic laws, we are shoplifting to a certain degree, writing bad checks, there's some elder abuse, but women overwhelmingly aren't killing anybody except people who try to kill them. Major property crimes, major drug crimes, major violent crimes — women commit almost none of them. Let’s focus on women for a little while and figure out what's going “right” with women when it comes to crime. Very few of us are talking about why women are not doing all of these things.

Sayed: I just first want to say that this is definitely one of the coolest classes I've taken so far.  I know this is kind of a question that most teachers ask, but this time I want to say to you, where do you see yourself in five years?  Do you see yourself writing another book, coming to teach at another school or college, or something like that?

Venezia: Thank you so much, I have loved having you all in class this semester.  I would very much like to be right here. I imagine myself to be one of those professors that they have to cart out of their office when they're 92 years old. My acupuncturist recently said to me that she feels as though she is at a point in her career where she really knows what she’s doing, and I would like to think that I am good at what I'm doing and I'm happy being in that place and doing that.  Southern Connecticut State University is such an amazing school in all of these ways: the location, the faculty, the facilities, and most of all the students - you guys are incredible - what you get done, where you come from, the experiences you bring, and you work hard, even with all of these challenges. You all in this room will soon be changing our state for the better, truly and deeply. So that means that in five years I would like to be bumping into my former students all the time and have them tell me all of these amazing things that they've done.  That would make me very, very happy. In more than five years, I'd like to teach your kids, if you have them. If you stay in the state, I'd like you to say to your kids, “I had Professor Michalsen’s class and are you gonna take your class?” I kind of want to cry thinking about that - it would be awesome for me, teaching generations of the most important people in the state, which is you all.  Thank you for asking me that.

Kristina: What is one quote or one of the biggest takeaways that you want people to apply in their lives from your book?

Venezia: Part Three of my book quotes the amazing Black feminist Audre Lorde. She wrote that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master's house.  Within the criminal legal system, to me, it means that you've got prisons that are directly descended from slavery and from Jim Crow. They are that system; they are inextricable from that system. 

So if you are working within and trying to move towards liberation, it is never going to work because the system is not broken. The system is working as designed. Therefore, we have to reimagine, we have to build our own tools, and maybe the tools are not sharp and hard, but are soft and squishy. 

It's like decolonizing your own head, right?  Getting away from your own internalized misogyny and your own internalized racism, or ableism, or anti-queerness. It's so much hard work, but those of us who want to get out and say, “no, we don't want your tools, we are going to make our own tools and create a whole new system on our own.” To me, that's just so unbelievably powerful. And Audre Lorde herself, right, just an absolute intellectual giant of a human.

Sayed: If you want to give one piece of advice to any of us that ever wants to be a Professor or a teacher or something like that, what would it be?

Venezia: Don't give up. You just have to keep going. Failure is your greatest teacher, right? You have to fail in order to learn anything. And you guys know a lot about not giving up, and you have to allow yourselves to fail and get back up. 

Attached to that is - I advise you to find people that, when you fail and when you fall, will help you get up.  You just have to keep going, but that takes community, so find people that make you feel safe, worthy and loved, and when you fail, they'll just say, “OK, well, that sucks. Let's put some hydrogen peroxide on your cut, get you a nap, and then we'll just keep moving.” And if that's me, fabulous, text me or email me! 

Five years from now, I welcome you to message me to say “oh, God, I just lost my job, or whatever the heck is going to be happening in five years, can I do this?” And you can depend on me to say, “of course you can do this.”  Trust me, really hard, difficult things happen in life, but just do your best to keep getting up. 

Thank you for all your questions — you guys are incredible — what you get done, where you come from, the experiences you bring, and you work hard, even with all of these challenges. You all in this room will soon be changing our state for the better, truly and deeply.