Subcultural Theory and Gender - Criminal Justice

Subcultural theory and gender examines how classical subcultural criminology, developed almost entirely from research on male offenders and male peer groups, has been extended, challenged, and substantially revised by feminist criminologists seeking to explain female participation in delinquent and criminal subcultures and to account for the specifically gendered mechanisms shaping subcultural life for both women and men. This article traces the largely male-centered origins of subcultural theory, examines the major feminist critiques and extensions that followed, and reviews contemporary research on women’s participation in gang, drug, and other subcultural settings within the broader Subcultural Theory tradition.

Introduction

Each of the classical subcultural theories, Cohen’s delinquent boys, Cloward and Ohlin’s differentiated opportunity structures, and Miller’s lower-class focal concerns, was developed from research populations that were overwhelmingly or exclusively male, and each theory’s central mechanisms, status frustration resolved through reaction formation, differential access to criminal apprenticeship, and toughness-oriented focal concerns, were formulated in terms that either implicitly assumed a male subject or addressed female delinquency only in passing, typically framing it as a secondary phenomenon derivative of male-centered dynamics such as sexual delinquency tied to relationships with delinquent boys rather than as an independently theorized pattern.

This near-total absence of female subjects and female-specific mechanisms from foundational subcultural theory drew increasing criticism beginning in the 1970s as feminist criminology developed into a distinct subfield, with early feminist critics arguing that criminology generally, and subcultural theory specifically, had either ignored female offending altogether or explained it through crude sexual or biological stereotypes rather than through the same structural and cultural mechanisms applied seriously to male offending.

This article proceeds from the male-centered origins of classical subcultural theory through the major feminist critiques of the 1970s and 1980s, contemporary ethnographic research on women’s participation in gang and drug subcultures, and the ongoing theoretical project of developing gender-inclusive subcultural explanations of crime.

The Male-Centered Origins of Classical Subcultural Theory

Albert Cohen’s Delinquent Boys addressed female delinquency directly only in a brief closing discussion, in which Cohen suggested that girls’ status problems centered on attractiveness and relationships with boys rather than on the same status frustration mechanism, involving school failure against a middle-class measuring rod, that he had developed at length for boys, an asymmetric treatment that left female delinquency theoretically undeveloped even within Cohen’s own framework (Cohen, 1955).

Walter Miller’s focal concerns, formulated explicitly around male street-corner group dynamics and organized substantially around masculine performance, toughness, and autonomy, offered even less direct theoretical purchase on female delinquency, since several of the specific focal concerns Miller identified were explicitly gendered in their content and enactment, leaving open the question of what, if any, parallel focal-concern structure might organize female peer-group life within the same lower-class communities Miller studied (Miller, 1958).

Wolfgang and Ferracuti’s subculture of violence theory offered a partial exception to this pattern in formal terms, explicitly stating that its counter-norm favoring violent response applied to both men and women within the subculture, yet the theory’s own supporting evidence and subsequent empirical elaboration focused overwhelmingly on male violence, treating masculine honor as the primary vehicle through which the theorized counter-norm actually operated in the communities Wolfgang originally studied (Wolfgang & Ferracuti, 1967).

This pattern of male-centered theorizing extended into empirical gang research as well, with early influential studies, including Thrasher’s foundational Chicago gang survey and subsequent mid-century observational studies, focusing overwhelmingly on male gangs and treating female auxiliary groups, where documented at all, as peripheral appendages to male gang structure rather than as subjects warranting independent theoretical attention (Thrasher, 1927; Short & Strodtbeck, 1965).

Feminist Critique and the “Add Women and Stir” Problem

Feminist criminologists identified a recurring pattern in early attempts to correct this male-centered bias, sometimes termed the “add women and stir” problem, in which existing male-centered theories were applied to female subjects with minimal modification, effectively assuming that the same mechanisms operating for men, status frustration, differential opportunity, or toughness-oriented focal concerns, would apply straightforwardly to women once researchers simply included female subjects in their samples, an approach critics argued failed to ask whether entirely different or substantially modified mechanisms might be needed to explain female subcultural participation (Chesney-Lind, 1989).

Meda Chesney-Lind’s influential critique argued that a genuinely feminist criminology needed to move beyond simply adding female subjects to existing frameworks and instead had to theorize how patriarchal social structures, including specifically gendered forms of victimization, sexual abuse, and family control, shaped pathways into delinquency and crime for girls and women in ways with no direct male parallel, a critique that generated the influential “pathways” perspective linking childhood victimization to subsequent female offending (Chesney-Lind, 1989; Chesney-Lind & Shelden, 2004).

Feminist critics also challenged subcultural theory’s implicit treatment of masculinity itself as an unmarked, unexamined category, arguing that theories organized around toughness, honor, and status competition were describing specifically masculine performances without acknowledging masculinity as a socially constructed and gendered accomplishment, a critique that directly informed the subsequent development of masculinity-centered subcultural analysis by Messerschmidt and others even as it originated from feminist scholarship’s broader challenge to gender-blind criminological theorizing (Messerschmidt, 1993).

Contemporary Research on Women’s Subcultural Participation

Jody Miller’s ethnographic research on girls in gangs found that young women’s participation in mixed-gender gang subcultures was shaped by a distinctive set of gendered dynamics, including the need to secure acceptance within a predominantly male-defined status system, sometimes by adopting elements of toughness-oriented performance similar to male members, while simultaneously facing gender-specific risks, including sexual exploitation by male gang members, that male-centered gang theory had not anticipated or adequately theorized (Miller, 2001).

Lisa Maher’s study of women in a Brooklyn drug market documented similarly gendered structuring of subcultural roles and status, finding that women were frequently relegated to lower-status, lower-income market roles than men holding comparable experience and connections, a pattern Maher attributed to the drug subculture’s reproduction of broader gendered labor-market dynamics rather than to any difference in women’s capability or willingness to participate in the subculture’s core activities (Maher, 1997).

Research on all-female or female-majority delinquent groups, though comparatively rare relative to research on male and mixed-gender groups, has documented that where such groups exist, they frequently develop status systems organized around some combination of toughness, loyalty, and reputation management recognizable from male-centered subcultural theory alongside distinctly gendered concerns, including navigating sexual reputation and managing relationships with male-dominated gang structures in the surrounding community, suggesting that gender shapes subcultural content and dynamics without female subcultural participation being reducible to a simple mirror image of male participation (Miller, 2001; Batchelor, 2009).

Toward Gender-Inclusive Subcultural Theory

Contemporary criminologists have increasingly sought to develop genuinely gender-inclusive subcultural frameworks that theorize both male and female subcultural participation as shaped by gender without treating either as the unmarked default category against which the other is measured, an approach requiring sustained attention to how gendered structures of opportunity, risk, and status operate differently, though not necessarily unequally in overall magnitude, for men and women within similar structural and neighborhood conditions (Miller, 2001; Messerschmidt, 1993).

Mark Warr’s research on delinquent peer groups more broadly has emphasized that gender differences in group-based delinquency are substantially, though not entirely, mediated by differences in group size, structure, and the specific activities peer groups organize around, suggesting that at least part of the gender gap in subcultural crime reflects differences in the kinds of peer groups available to and joined by young men and women rather than differences in the underlying peer-influence and status-seeking mechanisms subcultural theory identifies as common across genders (Warr, 1996).

This ongoing theoretical development connects directly to broader debates within feminist criminology over whether gender-specific or gender-neutral theoretical frameworks better serve the goal of fully explaining crime across the population, with most contemporary subcultural researchers favoring an integrated approach that retains core mechanisms, including status competition, peer socialization, and structural opportunity, while remaining attentive to how gender shapes their specific operation and consequences (Daly & Chesney-Lind, 1988).

Conclusion

Classical subcultural theory developed almost entirely from male research subjects and male-centered theoretical mechanisms, leaving female delinquency and crime either untheorized or addressed only through brief, underdeveloped secondary discussion within the foundational statements of Cohen, Miller, and their contemporaries. Feminist criminology’s sustained critique of this male-centered tradition, beginning prominently with Chesney-Lind’s work in the 1980s, established both a methodological caution against simply applying male-centered theories to female subjects without modification and a substantive research agenda examining how gendered structures of victimization and control shape female pathways into delinquency.

Contemporary ethnographic research on women’s participation in gang and drug subcultures, particularly the work of Jody Miller and Lisa Maher, has documented genuinely gender-specific dynamics of status, risk, and exploitation within predominantly male-defined subcultural settings, extending subcultural theory toward a fuller, still developing account of how gender shapes participation in and experience of subcultural crime for both women and men.

References and Further Reading

Batchelor, S. (2009). Girls, gangs and violence: Assessing the evidence. Probation Journal, 56(4), 399-414.
Campbell, A. (1984). The girls in the gang. Basil Blackwell.
Chesney-Lind, M. (1989). Girls’ crime and woman’s place: Toward a feminist model of female delinquency. Crime & Delinquency, 35(1), 5-29.
Chesney-Lind, M., & Shelden, R. G. (2004). Girls, delinquency, and juvenile justice (3rd ed.). Wadsworth.
Cohen, A. K. (1955). Delinquent boys: The culture of the gang. Free Press.
Daly, K., & Chesney-Lind, M. (1988). Feminism and criminology. Justice Quarterly, 5(4), 497-538.
Heidensohn, F. (1985). Women and crime. New York University Press.
Maher, L. (1997). Sexed work: Gender, race, and resistance in a Brooklyn drug market. Clarendon Press.
Messerschmidt, J. W. (1993). Masculinities and crime: Critical explorations in criminological theory. Rowman & Littlefield.
Miller, J. (2001). One of the guys: Girls, gangs, and gender. Oxford University Press.
Miller, W. B. (1958). Lower class culture as a generating milieu of gang delinquency. Journal of Social Issues, 14(3), 5-19.
Naffine, N. (1987). Female crime: The construction of women in criminology. Allen & Unwin.
Nurse, A. M. (2001). Coming of age in New Jersey: Adolescents, teachers, and the education of the child. Vanderbilt University Press.
Owen, B. (1998). In the mix: Struggle and survival in a women’s prison. State University of New York Press.
Presser, L. (2004). Violent offenders, moral selves: Constructing identities and accounts in the research interview. Social Problems, 51(1), 82-101.
Short, J. F., & Strodtbeck, F. L. (1965). Group process and gang delinquency. University of Chicago Press.
Simpson, S. S. (1989). Feminist theory, crime, and justice. Criminology, 27(4), 605-632.
Smart, C. (1976). Women, crime and criminology: A feminist critique. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Thrasher, F. M. (1927). The gang: A study of 1,313 gangs in Chicago. University of Chicago Press.
Warr, M. (1996). Organization and instigation in delinquent groups. Criminology, 34(1), 11-37.
Wolfgang, M. E., & Ferracuti, F. (1967). The subculture of violence: Towards an integrated theory in criminology. Tavistock.
Young, A. (1996). Imagining crime: Textual outlaws and criminal conversations. Sage Publications.
Zahn, M. A. (2009). The delinquent girl. Temple University Press.