Queering desistance: Chrononormativity,afterwardsness and young men’s sexual intimate partner violence

Abstract

Queer criminology has primarily focused on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people as victims and perpetrators of crime, as well as on the criminalization of non-heterosexual practices. In this article, we contribute to the emerging discussions on how queer theory can be used in relation to criminological research by exploring desistance processes from a queer temporality perspective. Desistance research emphasizes how and why individuals cease offending and is often guided by a teleology in which individuals are expected to mature and develop new, non-criminal identities. Work on queer temporality, in contrast, has developed thinking that destabilizes chronology and troubles normative life trajectories. In this article, we draw on queer temporality perspectives, particularly the concepts of chrononormativity and afterwardsness, in analysing narratives of young men who have used sexual violence against women partners in Sweden. We demonstrate how criminal identities may develop in retrospect, after desisting, and that identity and behaviour may not necessarily go together.

Introduction

Recently, there has been an upsurge in criminological research informed by queer perspectives (Ball, 2016; Buist and Lenning, 2015; Dwyer et al., 2015; Peterson and Panfil, 2014). A central concern has been to highlight ‘how the lives of LGBTIQ people are impacted by criminal justice processes, as victims, offenders, or agents of these systems, and ultimately to queer and disrupt these processes in the interests of greater social justice’ (Dwyer et al., 2015: 10). Queer criminological research has thus explored, for instance, intimate partner violence (IPV) in the context of queer lives (Ristock, 2011). Another central issue concerns the prohibition and regulation of same-sex sexuality and gender nonconformity (Buist and Lenning, 2015).

Ball (2014) distinguishes between three different usages of queer in relation to criminology. First, queer has been used as an empirical identity category, which needs to be included in criminological research. Second, researchers have also made use of queer theory ‘as a set of tools with which to understand and accurately represent the lives of sexuality- and gender-diverse people’ (Ball, 2014: 538). Third, there have been calls for a ‘queer criminology’ which more explicitly draws on the deconstructive attitude of queer theory. As Ball (2014, 2016) points out, queer criminology could benefit from more engagement with the concerns of queer theory in deconstructing presumably stable and orderly categorizations of identity.

In this article, we contribute to this emerging discussion on how queer theory can be productively used in relation to criminology. More specifically, we aim to add a queer lens to desistance by making use of queer temporality theorizing. Criminological research on desistance has focused on the processes in which individuals cease to offend by highlighting either structural life-course transitions (e.g. Laub and Sampson, 2003) or emphasizing subjective experiences, such as identity change (e.g. Giordano et al., 2007; Maruna, 2001; Paternoster and Bushway, 2009). Queer perspectives have been absent in this branch of criminology, while desistance, conversely, has not been at the centre of queer criminology. Our empirical focus is on young men in Sweden who have perpetrated sexual violence against women in intimate relationships. This is in line with queer theoretical efforts to destabilize the normative, including heterosexual masculinity (e.g. Sedgwick, 1985).

First, we present the main contours of desistance studies in relation to IPV before turning to the queer theorizing of temporality on which we draw. We then analyse two cases. The first consists of young men’s narratives of having committed sexual violations that were submitted to a recent feminist anti-violence campaign. The second consists of a case drawn from a study of men who have committed either sexual or physical acts of violence against intimate women partners in their youth. In analysing these narratives, we draw on theoretical resources from queer temporality, primarily the notions of chrononormativity and afterwardsness.

Desistance and IPV

Research on how and why individuals – primarily men – cease offending can be placed on a continuum depending on whether the emphasis is on structural or subjective desistance factors (Bersani and Doherty, 2018). In their life-course theory, Laub and Sampson (2003) stress transitions connected to moving into adulthood as particularly important, such as military service, marriage and education. These structural factors may initiate desistance processes as they create increased social control, give the individual man distance from delinquent networks and cause him to re-evaluate his life. While acknowledging the role of structural circumstances, criminologists emphasizing subjective factors of desistance pay greater attention to identity change, and particularly to the need to develop a new ‘prosocial’ self (Giordano et al., 2007; LeBel et al., 2008; Maruna, 2001). Maruna (2001) posits that desistance is tied to the possibility of developing a new identity and sense of belonging. Successful desisters differentiate between their ‘false’ and problematic criminal selves in the past and their contemporary ‘true’, responsible selves that want to ‘make good’. Paternoster and Bushway (2009), in contrast, stress the role of the ‘feared self’, which refers to the worry of a negative future identity in which the person continues committing crime. They argue that an awareness of the fact that a criminal lifestyle comes with more costs than benefits is crucial for the identity change that may lead to cessation.

Maturity is often pointed out as a key component in desistance. It has been argued that delinquency and criminal behaviour are incompatible with the adult role, and that antisocial behaviour in the teenage years is largely due to the individual’s ‘maturity gap’ between biological and social maturity (Moffitt, 2006). Giordano et al. (2007) emphasize the role of emotional maturation, arguing that when moving into adulthood, there may be a reduction of both negative and positive feelings regarding criminal behaviour as well as an increased ability to ‘manage emotions in socially acceptable ways’ (p. 1610). Laub and Sampson (2003) link maturity to desistance somewhat implicitly, as marriage and relationship formation are considered to strengthen social control. Similarly, Carlsson (2013) argues that desistance is a matter of striving towards ‘a lifestyle characterized by law-abiding work, heterosexual monogamy, and family formation’ (p. 675). Thus, to successfully desist and ‘grow out’ of crime, the ‘ideal’ delinquent youth needs to follow a relatively ‘straight’ lifeline and become a self-controlling adult in a heterosexual, monogamous relationship. This kind of heteronormative life story, however, is precisely what is called into question within queer temporality theorizing, which informs the analysis in this article.

It is crucial to note that there are different styles of desistance depending on the unique features of the crime. This is particularly important when it comes to IPV, as it has a different social dynamic than other forms of offending. While marriage is often presented as an institution that helps criminal men to desist, intimate relationships are the very settings for partner abuse (Gadd and Farrall, 2004). Giordano et al. (2015) posit that IPV also differs from other criminal behaviour by being less accepted by bystanders and largely viewed as a relationship failure. IPV researchers have previously argued that offenders progress through different ‘stages of change’ in a relatively orderly fashion, moving from ignorance to crisis and change (Scott, 2004). Importantly, studies on desisting from IPV have focused exclusively on physical but not sexual forms of violence (Walker et al., 2013). Harris’ (2014, 2016) research is therefore relevant as she identifies different styles of desistance from sexual offending. A central difference concerns whether the desisters were resigned and ‘stuck in the past’ or, alternatively, more resilient and ‘tended to look at the future with hope and optimism’ (Harris, 2016: 1724). It should be noted, however, that the majority of the perpetrators in that study had child victims. More recent feminist violence research confirms Harris’ findings and suggests that desistance from IPV is not linear with identical stages for each individual but could rather be an ‘uneven and contradictory process’ (Downes et al., 2019: 279; see also Gottzén, 2019b; Walker et al., 2018). Achieving desistance may require years of commitment and include setbacks and relapses, and desisters do not always easily produce straightforward narratives of the self (Gottzén, 2019b). A queer perspective on temporality can help nuance such processes further, emphasizing that individuals do not necessarily move from one stable identity to another, that identities are messy and contingent and that stories of the self may be temporally irregular.

Theorizing queer temporality

Issues of temporality lie at the heart of queer theory. Foucault (1978) aimed to denaturalize categories of sexual identification. He showed how categories such as ‘homosexuality’ are not stable and self-evident but rather the outcome of contingent historical processes. Similarly, Sedgwick (1985) argued that feminist theory at that time faced a false choice between an analysis of sexuality, which had been the domain of radical feminism, and an analysis of history, which had been the concern of Marxist feminism. For her, queer theory emerged as the possibility of analysing gender and sexuality in temporal terms, revealing how configurations of desire are both messy and changing. Butler (1990) introduced a temporal aspect into the feminist debate on sex and gender, arguing that the impression of a stable gender identity is generated in the repetition of performative acts over time.

While the early work in queer theory foregrounded temporal aspects in order to denaturalize hegemonic heterosexual notions of gender and sexuality categories, later work on queer temporality has focused on how heterosexual norms take the form of a normative life course. In the words of Halberstam,

Queer time for me is the dark nightclub, the perverse turn away from the narrative coherence of adolescence – early adulthood – marriage – reproduction – child rearing – retirement – death, the embrace of late childhood in place of early adulthood or immaturity in place of responsibility. (Halberstam in Dinshaw et al., 2007: 182)

Here, we see two central ideas in queer temporality scholarship. First, there is a heteronormative ‘life schedule’ (Halberstam, 2005) or ‘lifeline’ (Ahmed, 2006) according to which a life should encompass certain events that need to take place at a certain time and in a certain order. We will use Freeman’s (2010) concept of chrononormativity to refer to such normative organization of time. Second, there is the idea of a temporal coding, which highlights how deviations from normative life schedules are understood in temporal terms such as ‘immaturity’. Queer temporality scholarship thus interrogates the effects of temporal attributions such as development, maturity, childishness, untimeliness, belatedness or growing up.

Queer theory often focuses on the power effects of such attributions for queer lives and experiences, as well as the possibilities of resistance and difference, such as ‘growing sideways’ instead of growing up (Stockton, 2009). The concept of afterwardsness (Nachträglichkeit) has been taken up from psychoanalysis in order to highlight how past and present are mutually constituted (Freeman, 2010; Stockton, 2009). Queer work also focuses on deconstructing the normative, such as heterosexual masculinity, which is the concern of the present article (e.g. Sedgwick, 1985). Informed by a queer temporality perspective, we now turn to our first case.

Chrononormative progress narratives

In our first case, we draw on young men’s stories submitted to a feminist anti-violence campaign in Sweden called ‘Fatta Man’ (literary meaning ‘Get It, Man’). This campaign was run by the feminist non-governmental organizations (NGOs) Män för Jämställdhet (Men for Gender Equality), Make Equal and Femtastic from 2014 to 2017. The purpose was to work to bring about stricter laws on sexual assault and to make men and boys ‘a part of the positive change and create new norms of sex, sexuality and violence’ (Fatta Man, 2015: 3). When starting the campaign, they called for stories about ‘grey zones, insecurity and events where we who define ourselves as men have crossed the borders of what’s okay’ (Fatta Man, 2015: 3). They received 52 anonymous texts; most of the writers identified as young men, and most of the events of sexism and sexual violence had occurred earlier in life (cf. Gottzén, 2019a). In the narratives, sexual violations were recurrently linked to immaturity and youth, as in the following example:

I grew up in the countryside in a small municipality in mid-Sweden and it wasn’t until I started at a regional upper secondary school that I understood that what happened at my lower secondary wasn’t OK. There was a group of us boys who on several occasions groped the ‘hot chicks’ in class. On their breasts and butts, both outside and inside their clothes. I haven’t talked with anybody about this. That norm is still there. I think that I’ve dismissed it as boyish bouts, but now afterwards I’ve thought much about how it affected the molested girls. (#40)

This story epitomizes how the young men write about having moved from an ignorant past to a more enlightened present, which allows them to present their own life stories about sexual violence while simultaneously positioning themselves vis-à-vis a previous heteromasculine self. This narrator also describes his movement in terms of spatiality. Moving away from sexual violence is embedded within a movement from lower to upper secondary school, as well as a movement from a rural town to the city. This movement becomes associated with development and maturity, leaving behind a previous definition of sexist behaviour as ‘boyish bouts’ (Swe: pojkryck, similar to the English ‘boys will be boys’). In many ways, this narrative confirms the arguments of desistance researchers that offenders ‘grow out’ of crime as they get older and move through different life stages (e.g. Laub and Sampson, 2003), as well as the role of maturity in increased self-control (e.g. Giordano et al., 2007; Moffitt, 2006). The story presents a ‘regular’ life course, where the young man first embodies a normative heterosexual adolescent masculinity, characterized by heterosexual desire and ‘strong’ sexual drive. He then moves away from immature heterosexuality and its sexual violations when transitioning into a new life phase with a changed social network.

However, such retrospective stories also accomplish something here and now. We suggest that these stories cannot simply be read as evidence of an ideal desistance process. Using a queer temporality lens, we want to pay attention to how temporal attributions operate in the narratives, and particularly to how sexual violence becomes ascribed as an effect of ‘immaturity’. As such, the narratives could be regarded as chrononormative (Freeman, 2010) in presenting a story of linear development from unruly youth to responsible adulthood. The temporal coding of sexual violence in terms of immaturity, however, has a wider cultural resonance. We would like to draw attention to some similarities with a general narrative about Sweden as a liberal country. This narrative often revolves around the modern and progressive nation with its universal welfare state and, in particular, a comparatively high degree of gender equality. Gender equality policies have largely focused on creating equal opportunities for women and men to balance work and family life, but also include the recognition that ‘men’s violence against women must stop’ (Government Offices of Sweden, 2019: 2). In policy discourse, Sweden is often portrayed as a gender-equal country that still has certain areas of inequality. Most prominent among these is violence against women, which constitutes ‘an obstacle to further progress towards equality between women and men’ (Government Bill, 1998: 21, our translation). In this chrononormative narrative, sexual violence often figures as an ‘anachronistic remnant’ from a traditional Swedish society and ‘an obstacle for the modern regime we already live in’ (Wendt Höjer, 2002: 179, our translation). Interestingly, in both the Swedish progress narrative and the Fatta Man stories, sexual violence is attributed to a sexist, abusive and undeveloped past. The present is imagined as modern, mature and gender-equal; a designation which casts continuing sexual violence as anachronistic.

While the Fatta Man stories on one level harbour a rather chrononormative narrative of moving from immaturity to maturity and from abuse to a respectable heteromasculinity, they also sometimes suggest that sexual violence is not always simply left behind, since the narrators continue to think about the violations. This is evident in the quote above (#40) in which the effects of the violations are considered only in retrospect. It is also apparent in a reflection following a story about non-consent in adolescence:

I’m twenty-five now, and though I can dismiss some of the guilt I feel due to youth/ignorance, patriarchy/society, etc., knowing that I had sex with a girl who probably didn’t want to is still something that hurts me. (#31)

In this excerpt, it seems as if the narrator’s previous abusive and youthful heterosexuality haunts him; even though it all happened a long time ago, the experience continues to affect him. Most Fatta Man narrators point out that they were involved in sexual violations that they did not reflect on at the time, or that they at the time considered acceptable but that they now see as reprehensible. In this sense, these narratives differ from some previous desistance research (e.g. Giordano et al., 2015; Maruna, 2001) since the identities at the time of offending were not necessarily deviant or antisocial, but rather in line with young normative heterosexual masculinity. For instance, in one story, the narrator tells about an event that was about to lead to rape: ‘Today the whole event feels unpleasant; I am anxious and ashamed of it, mostly because I took the liberty of doing things that I knew were not okay, and THAT is not okay’ (#14). Another example is a story about a young man nagging and pestering a female friend into having sex. He argues, ‘Today, I’m ashamed of my behaviour, though I didn’t think about it at the time. I took the liberty to do something I assumed she wanted, without consent . . . never again’ (#35).

The Fatta Man stories seem to complicate the notion of leaving old identities behind in order to desist. The narrators are looking back affectively towards their problematic past, but there is little sense that they are getting stuck. Instead, they are clearly moving away from sexual violence, and volunteer to share their experiences in a feminist campaign aimed at transforming the future. Gottzén (2019b) has shown that partner-violent men may experience epiphanies in which they realize that their behaviour is to be understood as violence and start seeing themselves as ‘woman batterers’, which initiates desistance. The Fatta Man stories, however, present identity change only when looking back, since the revelations take place a long time after the violence has stopped. This resembles Harris’ (2014) finding that sexual offenders come to re-evaluate their past offending through therapy, and thus see their actions differently. In this sense, the Fatta Man narrators simultaneously embrace identities as offenders (by looking back and re-defining their past behaviour as sexual violence or violations) and create ‘prosocial’ future selves where they have left such immature masculinity behind. In order to further this discussion of complex temporalities and offender identities, we now turn to our second case and to the concept of afterwardsness.

Afterwardsness

Our second case comes from a study of men who have committed physical or sexual violence against an intimate woman partner in their youth. We have conducted qualitative interviews with 13 men (ages 17–45) inside of as well as outside of the legal system who have used violence under the age of 25. The men are predominantly White and come from working-class and middle-class backgrounds. The interviews were 1–3 hours in length and focused on enabling participants to tell their story. We have given participants fictional names and removed or replaced some details for the sake of anonymity (cf. Berggren and Gottzén, in preparation).

Christopher is a 23-year-old White man studying for a professional degree at a university. He sexually assaulted his first girlfriend over a period of time, acts that would be considered as rape according to contemporary Swedish legislation. Unlike most persons interviewed in desistance studies, however, he has been neither reported nor convicted. In analysing Christopher’s narrative, we make use of Freud’s concept of afterwardsness, and particularly of its appropriation within queer temporality. Afterwardsness refers to how events that are registered at one point only become understood or take on a new significance at a later stage. Freud himself initially used the concept to ‘describe how sexually charged encounters in childhood produce traumatic effects after the fact, when puberty ascribes new meanings to these memories’, whereas recent discussion suggests a broader use focused on ‘experiences of retrospective disorganization’ (Goldin, 2016: 408). Within queer temporality writing, Stockton (2009) points out that afterwardsness involves both ‘deferred effect and belated understanding’ (p. 14). In other words, the past influences the present, while new experiences simultaneously transform the meaning of that very past. This non-linear conception of time fits well with the concerns of queer temporality.

From age 15 to age 18, Christopher had a relationship with Sandra, who was 1 year younger. He describes what he did to her in terms of ‘nagging sex’ (Swedish: tjatsex). This wording implies that the sex was preceded by verbal pressure, eventually leading to consent. However, when prompted to describe what he would say when he was nagging, he fails to recall any specific expression, and instead admits that the pressure was more physical than verbal. It was only later that he came to understand what happened as problematic:

I:

But when, how did you start to think about this as nagging sex? Or started to think about it in another way?

C:

Yeah, it was after we had broken up.

I:

Shortly after, or after a long time, or?

C:

When was it that people started talking about nagging sex? Wasn’t it, maybe it was a year after, around 2015, 2014. When it was brought up in public debate, then I realized what I had done. During the actual relationship I thought about it . . . a few times, but not often at all, but I thought more that I should be . . . a real man who sleeps with his girlfriend. And then afterwards I came to understand that this was a matter of nagging sex.

Here, as well as in other parts of the interview, Christopher is somewhat vague on whether he felt he was doing something wrong at the time or not. It seems like there was something bothering him, from time to time, about the way he got to have sex, after ‘nagging’ his girlfriend. His more frequent interpretation, however, was that he succeeded in being ‘a real man’ through sex, thus adhering to norms of heterosexual masculinity.

As a result of encountering a feminist campaign about sexuality and consent, he began to reconsider his actions. What were initially mainly registered as happy events, in which he lived up to the expectations of a successful heterosexual young man, were then transformed into moments of exerting pressure and wearing down resistance. The transformation accelerated when the frame of nagging sex was also called into question. This happened when Sandra got in touch again, saying that ‘you have raped me’ and that she did not consent to sexual intercourse. While Christopher makes it clear that he can understand Sandra’s point of view, he himself still prefers the term ‘nagging sex’. This is in line with how perpetrators tend to downplay their responsibility by minimizing their violence (e.g. Cavanagh et al., 2001; Hearn, 1998).

Although some uncertainties and contradictions exist throughout Christopher’s story, the meaning of the sexual events changed rather drastically over time for him. Alcoff (2018) argues that survivors’ experiences of sexual violations are related to temporally shifting discursive frameworks. Hence, feminist transformations of public discourse surrounding sexual violence affect how individuals experience their past. In this case, it becomes evident that such discursive transformations affect perpetrators as well as survivors. We argue that the concept of afterwardsness can usefully be applied not only to intrapersonal changes as it was originally used within psychoanalysis, but also to broader societal shifts of this kind. In this case, sexual events from the past face different readings in the present, which leads to ‘experiences of retrospective disorganization’ (Goldin, 2016), and changes the perpetrator’s view of and feelings towards himself (p. 408).

One of the most striking features of this case concerns how different readings of the past have distinct implications for Christopher’s identity in the present, as well as for the future. His parents, current partner and some friends and acquaintances are aware of what he did to Sandra. Broadly speaking, his social network exhibits two different kinds of responses. Several persons have treated the events more or less as a mistake: ‘Everybody makes mistakes’ and ‘As long as you’re not doing it now . . .’, some of his friends commented. ‘It is so common . . . everybody has pressured someone into having sex’, said his current partner. Many people in Christopher’s social network supported him as a person, but did not approve of his actions. However, others treated the events as more serious problems warranting social rejection. Some friends announced that he was not welcome among them anymore. On social media, one acquaintance posted that he is a danger to any woman, and threatened to interfere if he tried to make new friends. Christopher reports having felt very bad about what happened, including having suicidal thoughts and feelings of not deserving the support he has received, as well as still thinking about the events regularly.

These different responses can be considered in the light of Foucault’s (1978) analysis of how the view of same-sex sexual acts as forbidden acts was superseded by homosexuality as an identity category; as he famously put it, ‘The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species’ (p. 43). A similar distinction between temporary aberration (acts) and enduring nature (identity) operated in the responses from Christopher’s social network (cf. Hirsch and Khan, 2020): Are they dealing with a normal person guilty of temporary forbidden acts, or are they facing an exemplar of the category of sexual offender, a deviant nature who may remain a threat to the women he encounters in the future?

C:

What I find most difficult is what I did to Sandra, and then I find it hard to be outed on [a social media platform]. That was really hard and it’s something I’m afraid might happen again. And that it will spread even more, and that, well . . . So, I guess that’s it. It’s hard that I’ve done it, and it’s hard that there’s a risk that I will lose even more friends and that even more people might find out what I have done when it’s not me who tells them. Like, mainly I think that I would lose friends.

As the excerpt suggests, the afterwards introduction of events in Christopher’s life as abusive changes not only his self-identity and feelings towards himself, but also his future. He has lost friends because of his actions in the past; this threat still exists in the present and haunts his destiny. He has chosen to ‘come out’ to new friends and partners in an attempt to safeguard his version and minimize the risk of further losses (cf. Gottzén, 2017).

Christopher’s case illustrates the usefulness of afterwardsness as a conceptual tool for thinking critically about the complex relations between past and present, and between acts and identities. Encountering a feminist consent campaign made him reframe his previous sexual experiences from ‘innocent teenage sex’ into a problematic grey area of sexual coercion. He was then confronted by Sandra, who defined the very same experiences as rape. As a result, his affective memory of the sexual acts seems to change dramatically, acquiring a rather traumatizing effect and rendering himself less worthy of love. What was initially experienced as heteromasculine success, he now sees as highly problematic and perhaps even a crime. While he did not embrace a ‘deviant’ or offender identity – or even acknowledged that he did anything wrong – at the time of the abuses, he now negotiates an identity as a sexual offender.

Conclusion

In this article, we contribute to the queer criminological project by making use of queer temporality theorizing in relation to desistance from sexual IPV. Desistance studies have usefully highlighted the temporal dimension in the cessation of offending. But even though they stress the variety of desistance experiences, they tend to end up with narratives of maturity and dichotomies between prior and current identities. Queer temporality offers theoretical tools to nuance such chronologies. On the one hand, queer temporality interrogates the effects of temporal attributions such as ‘maturity’. In our first case, our analysis of narratives submitted to a feminist anti-violence campaign suggests that sexual violence tends to be described chrononormatively, as something that belongs to a previous immature masculinity. We read such narratives not only as stories of successful desistance, but also as aligned with chrononormative depictions of Sweden as a gender-equal country, which turns the persistence of sexual violence into an anachronism. On the other hand, queer temporality pinpoints non-linear temporalities. Previous research has argued that desistance from IPV may be a contradictory process (e.g. Downes et al., 2019; Gottzén, 2019b). In this article, we have expanded on this by exploring how individuals may become perpetrators of sexual violence only in retrospect. In Christopher’s narrative, what he first experienced as successfully having sex subsequently turned into a sexual grey zone with pressurized sex, as well as into rape. This unfolding had important consequences for his identity. The concept of afterwardsness is instrumental in capturing this kind of temporal narrative by complicating the notion that successful desisters leave their previous criminal identity behind (Maruna, 2001), or that desistance is based on a fear of a future negative identity (Paternoster and Bushway, 2009). The men in the Fatta Man stories seem to simultaneously embrace a ‘prosocial’ self and an identity as a (previous) offender, while Christopher seems to be much more uncertain and troubled about his contemporary identity. Thus, in our data, the offender identity seems to become relevant only after desisting (cf. Harris, 2014). This suggests that desistance processes are not necessarily tied to ‘positive’ identity change but rather that the relation between criminal and non-criminal identities is more ambiguous than previously suggested, at least regarding sexual IPV. This could be related to sexual IPV – unlike what some researchers have argued about other forms of IPV (Giordano et al., 2015) – not being generally viewed as the sort of ‘failure’ event which prompts the perpetrator to self-identify as a criminal. Instead, at the time of the sexual violations, they seem to have been regarded as normative heterosexual masculine behaviour, acquiring their problematic (and criminal) status only retrospectively.

In turning a queer eye to desistance, our work continues the queer theoretical tradition of deconstructing the normative, including heterosexual masculinity. As Ball (2014) has pointed out, queer perspectives can contribute to criminology not only by including a wider range of gender and sexual identities, but also through its deconstructive attitude. Our work demonstrates how a queer perspective on temporality can trouble linear and heteronormative stories about maturity, identity and desistance.