Surveying Deviance,Figuring Disgust: Locating the Homocriminal Body in Time and Space

Abstract

This article is grounded in a critical appraisal of seminal archival documents pertaining to criminology’s knowledge of homosexual offences (and offensive behaviour) in Australia - the ‘Male Sex Offences in Public Places’ Proceedings of the Institute of Criminology (1970). It explores the role the legal gaze and the juridico-cultural imagination play in producing discourse that constructs gay male desirous bodies as flowing through the space of the city, posing the twin threats of corruption and engulfment to other, non-homosexual male bodies. My concern is to explore the theme of mapping (as a product of legal anxiety) and to elucidate how legal vision functions as a stigmatizing gaze that repudiates gay desire as a polluting flow requiring vigilance and continual regulation. To that end the article employs cartographic practices of analysis to explore how legal doctrine is mapped onto space. Additionally, it is argued that the Proceedings borrow tropes of monstrosity to chart the movement of homosexual bodies through the space of the city as imperilling other men at large.