Literature on sexuality in criminological contexts exists, yet much of it is sex-negative, employs a “deviance frame,” and regards many sex acts as dangerous or destructive. Although research that could be considered sex-positive has been undertaken, an explicitly sex-positive theoretical and practical framework for feminist criminology has not yet been advanced. In this article, we propose “thick desire” as a way to envision an intersectional sex-positive feminist criminology that aligns with the principles of a positive sexuality approach to research and praxis. We explore the issue of criminalization of teen sexting to begin to integrate these principles.
CameronE.BurrisS.ClaytonM. (2008). HIV is a virus, not a crime: Ten reasons against criminal statutes and criminal prosecutions. Journal of the International AIDS Society, 11, 7-13.
CrenshawK. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6),1241–1299.
18.
CroftsT.LeeM.McGovernA.MilivojevicS. (2015). Sexting and young people. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
DraperN. R. (2012). Is your teen at risk? Discourses of adolescent sexting in United States television news. Journal of Children and Media, 6, 221-236.
24.
DugganL.HunterN. D. (1995). Sex wars: Essays on sexual dissent and American politics. New York, NY: Routledge.
25.
DworkinA. (1985). Against the male flood: Censorship, pornography, and equality. Harvard Women’s Law Journal, 8, 1-30.
26.
DwyerA. (2014). “We’re not like these weird feather boa-covered AIDS-spreading monsters”: How LGBT young people and service providers think riskiness informs LGBT youth–police interactions. Critical Criminology, 22, 65-79.
27.
EastonD.HardyJ. W. (2009). The ethical slut: A practical guide to polyamory, open relationships and other adventures. Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts Press.
28.
ElliottS. (2010). Parents’ constructions of teen sexuality: Sex panics, contradictory discourses, and social inequality. Symbolic Interaction, 33, 191-212.
29.
ErakerE. C. (2010). Stemming sexting: Sensible legal approaches to teenagers’ exchange of self-produced pornography. Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 25, 555-596.
30.
FahsB. (2014). “Freedom to” and “freedom from”: A new vision for sex-positive politics. Sexualities, 17, 267-290.
31.
FahsB.DudyM. L.StageS. (2013). The moral panics of sexuality. London, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
32.
FerberA. L. (2007). The construction of Black masculinity: White supremacy now and then. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 31, 11-24.
33.
FergusonR. A. (2004). Aberrations in black: Toward a queer of color critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
34.
FineM.McClellandS. (2006). Sexuality, education, and desire: Still missing after all these years. Harvard Educational Review, 76, 297-338.
35.
FinerL. (2007). Trends in premarital sex in the United States, 1954-2003. Public Health Reports, 122, 73-78.
36.
FoucaultM. (1978). The history of sexuality (Vol. I). New York, NY: Pantheon.
37.
FoulkesR. K. (2008). Abstinence-only education and minority teenagers: The importance of race in a question of constitutionality. Berkeley Journal of African-American Law & Policy, 10, 3-51.
GoffmanE. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
44.
GoodeE.Ben-YehudaN. (1994). Moral panics: Culture, politics, and social construction. Annual Review of Sociology, 20, 149-171.
45.
GregoryT. (2015). Sexting and the politics of the image: When the invisible becomes visible in a consensus democracy. Porn Studies, 2, 342-355.
46.
HasinoffA. A. (2012). Should teens have the right to sext? Privacy, consent, and social media. In GreenbergJ.ElliottC. (Eds.), Communication in question: Competing perspectives on controversial issues in communication studies (pp. 159-165). Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Thomson Nelson.
47.
HasinoffA. A. (2015). Sexting panic: Rethinking criminalization, privacy, and consent. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
48.
HeapC. (2003). The city as a sexual laboratory: The queer heritage of the Chicago school. Qualitative Sociology, 26, 457-487.
49.
HensleyC.TewksburyR. (2002). Inmate-to-inmate prison sexuality: A review of empirical studies. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 3, 226-243.
50.
HollandS. P. (2012). The erotic life of racism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
51.
HolsingerK. (2000). Feminist perspectives on female offending: Examining real girls’ lives. Women & Criminal Justice, 12, 23-52.
52.
HolsingerK.HodgeJ. P. (2016). The experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender girls in juvenile justice systems. Feminist Criminology, 11, 23-47.
JennessV. (2015). Gender and sexuality as methodological confounds in the study of transgender prisoners. In MaltzM. D.RiceS. K. (Eds.), Envisioning criminology (pp. 65-75). Cham, Switzerland: Springer International.
56.
KaplanM. (2014). Sex-positive law. New York University Law Review, 89, 89-164.
57.
KaraianL. (2014). Policing “sexting”: Responsibilization, respectability and sexual subjectivity in child protection/crime prevention responses to teenagers’ digital sexual expression. Theoretical Criminology, 18, 282-299.
58.
KatzJ. N. (1990). The invention of heterosexuality. Socialist Review, 20, 7-34.
KnupferA. M. (2001). Reform and resistance: Gender, delinquency, and America’s first juvenile court. New York, NY: Routledge.
61.
KunzelR. G. (2008). Criminal intimacy: Prison and the uneven history of modern American sexuality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
62.
LaFranceD. E.LoeM.BrownS. C. (2012). “Yes means yes”: A new approach to sexual assault prevention and positive sexuality promotion. American Journal of Sexuality Education, 7, 445-460.
63.
LaingM.PilcherK.SmithN. (Eds.). (2015). Queer sex work. New York, NY: Routledge.
LiazosA. (1972). The poverty of the sociology of deviance: Nuts, sluts, and preverts. Social Problems, 20, 103-120.
70.
LombrosoC.FerreroG. (2004). Criminal woman, the prostitute, and the normal woman (RafterN. H.GibsonM., Trans.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (Original work published 1895)
71.
LopezV.NuñoL. (2016). Latina and African-American girls in the juvenile justice system: Needs, problems, and solutions. Sociology Compass, 10, 24-37.
72.
LorangM. R.McNielD. E.BinderR. L. (2016). Minors and sexting: Legal implications. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Online, 44, 73-81.
73.
MacKinnonC. A. (1985). Pornography, civil rights, and speech. Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, 20, 10-68.
MatysczykC. (2015, September21). Teen arrested for allegedly having nude photos of himself on his phone: A North Carolina boy finds himself looking at felony sex offender charges in which perpetrator and victim are both him. CNET|Tech Culture. Retrieved from http://www.cnet.com/news/teen-arrested-for-having-nude-photos-of-himself-on-his-phone/
MillerJ. (2008). Getting played: African American girls, urban inequality, and gendered violence. New York: New York University Press.
79.
MogulJ. L.RitchieA. J.WhitlockK. (2011). Queer (in)justice: The criminalization of LGBT people in the United States. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
80.
NagaiT. (2016). Multiracial Americans throughout the history of the U.S. In KorgenK. O. (Ed.), Race policy and multiracial Americans (pp. 13-28). Bristol, UK: Policy Press.
81.
NathansonC. (1991). Dangerous passage: The social control of sexuality in women’s adolescence. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
82.
OdemM. E. (1995). Delinquent daughters: Protecting and policing adolescent female sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
83.
OgasO.GaddamS. (2011). A billion wicked thoughts. New York, NY: Dutton.
84.
OstragerB. (2010). SMS. OMG! LOL! TTYL: Translating the law to accommodate today’s teens and the evolution from texting to sexting. Family Court Review, 48, 712-726.
85.
PaltrowL. M. (2013). Roe v Wade and the new Jane Crow: Reproductive rights in the age of mass incarceration. American Journal of Public Health, 103, 17-21.
86.
PaltrowL. M.FlavinJ. (2013). Arrests of and forced interventions on pregnant women in the United States, 1973-2005: Implications for women’s legal status and public health. Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, 38(2), 299–343.
87.
PanfilV. R.MillerJ. (2014). Beyond the straight and narrow: The import of queer criminology for criminology and criminal justice. The Criminologist, 39(4), 1-9.
88.
PaskoL. (2010). Damaged daughters: The history of girls’ sexuality and the juvenile justice system. The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 100, 1099-1130.
PetersonD.PanfilV. R. (2014). Introduction: Reducing the invisibility of sexual and gender identities in criminology and criminal justice. In PetersonD.PanfilV. R. (Eds.), Handbook of LGBT communities, crime, and justice (pp. 3-13). New York, NY: Springer.
PuglionesiA. (2015). “Your whole effort has been to create desire”: Reproducing knowledge and evading censorship in the Nineteenth-Century subscription press. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 89, 463-490.
93.
PuriJ. (2002). Woman, body, desire in post-colonial India: Narratives of gender and sexuality. Routledge.
94.
ReissA. J.Jr. (1961). The social integration of queers and peers. Social Problems, 9, 102-120.
95.
RichardsonL. (2000). Writing: A method of inquiry. In DenzinN. K.LincolnY. S. (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 923-948). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
96.
RichieB. (2005). Queering antiprison work: African American lesbians in the juvenile justice system. In SudburyJ. (Ed.), Global lockdown: Race, gender, and the prison-industrial complex (pp. 73-85). London, England: Routledge.
RubinG. S. (2011). Thinking sex: Notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. In RubinG. S. (Ed.), Deviations: A Gayle Rubin reader (pp. 137-181). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (Original work published 1984)
100.
SchaffnerL. (2007). Violence against girls provokes girls’ violence: From private injury to public harm. Violence Against Women, 13, 1229-1248.
101.
SchaffnerL. (2014). Out of sight, out of compliance: U.S. detained girls’ health justice. Contemporary Justice Review, 17, 63-86.
TaorminoT.PenleyC.ShimizuC.Miller-YoungM. (Eds.). (2013). The feminist porn book: The politics of producing pleasure. New York, NY: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York.
110.
ThompsonS. (2014). Sexting prosecutions: Minors as a protected class from child pornography charges. University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat, 48(11), 11-19.
TomsenS. (1997). Was Lombroso queer? Criminology, criminal justice and the heterosexual imaginary. In MasonG.TomsenS. (Eds.), Homophobic violence (pp. 33-45). Annandale, New South Wales, Australia: The Hawkins Press.
ValentiJ. (2009). The purity myth: How America’s obsession with virginity is hurting young women. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press.
115.
WilliamsD. J.ThomasJ. N.PriorE. E.WaltersW. (2015). Introducing a multidisciplinary framework of positive sexuality. Journal of Positive Sexuality, 1, 6-11.
116.
WolakJ.FinkelhorD.MitchellK. J. (2011). How often are teens arrested for sexting? Data from a national sample of police cases. Pediatrics, 129(1), 1-9.
117.
WoodsJ. B. (2014). “Queering criminology”: Overview of the state of the field. In PetersonD.PanfilV. R. (Eds.), Handbook of LGBT communities, crime, and justice (pp. 15-41). New York, NY: Springer.
118.
WoodsJ. B. (2015). The birth of modern criminology and gendered constructions of homosexual criminal identity. Journal of Homosexuality, 62, 131-166.
119.
WoodsJ. B. (2017). LGBT identity and crime. California Law Review, 105.
120.
WorthenM. G. F. (2016). Sexual deviance and society: A sociological examination. London, England: Routledge.
