Dana Peterson - Handbook of LGBT Communities, Crime, and Justice

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The most proximal impetus for this collection emerged from the 2011 annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), held in Washington, DC. The second author had experienced previous difficulty in placement of her research with queer youth populations on ill-fitting panels; the panels were hodge-podge collections with no thematic thread, or organizers made assumptions about the nature of the work. For example, one year she was placed on a panel with scholars of youth sexual violence (though those words appeared in her presentation, they were certainly not in that order!). It seemed criminologists were befuddled with just what to do with such work (and, even finding an appropriate topic area, pre-defined by conference organizers, to which to submit an abstract was a challenge). We decided instead that she should organize her own panel and invite authors doing work on similar topics; thus was entered onto the conference program the panel entitled The Role of Identity in LGBT Individuals Responses to Violence, chaired by the first author and with papers presented by the second author (on gay gang- and crime-involved young mens use of violence to respond to anti-gay harassment), by Andrea Nichols and Jody Miller (on intersectional identities and experiences of Sri Lankan nachchi sex workers), and by Laura S. Logan (on queer womens resistance to street harassment). These papers highlighted that, while experiences of violence and the construction and negotiation of identity apply to all people, the individuals in these studies experience them from particular places, from intersections of sexual orientation and gender identity that structure their experiences of and responses to victimization. Further, the authors demonstrated that, relevant to CCJ, certain aspects of violence cannot be understood, and violence prevention efforts mounted, unless the roles of sexual orientation and gender identity, within the context of societal heterosexism, are taken into account. These salient intersections, we (and others) argue, must be examined and understood in diverse disciplines and not limited to places like womens studies programs, queer studies programs, urban studies, and so on; CCJ can provide an interdisciplinary context that brings these perspectives togetherprovided we open our eyes to the issues.

Importantly, the panel attracted the attention of an Editor at Springer Publishing, who contacted the first author to inquire whether we would be interested in submitting a book prospectus on the topic of the panel. As evidenced by the existence of this Handbook , we jumped at the opportunity, not just to further work about LGBT individuals responses to violence (highlighting their agency), but to bring together for CCJ a collection of work dealing with a range of issues about LGBT people and their interactions with legal systems and, even more broadly, integrating perspectives of justice, health, and human rights in hopes, ultimately, of improving theory, research, and practice in all of these areas, globally. That a well-known publisher of criminological and criminal justice titles was interested in promoting this work was a welcome sign and an indicator of shifts within CCJ that are beginning to allow space for consideration of these issues.