Synopses & Reviews
What is the relationship between criminality and biology? Nineteenth-century phrenologists insisted that criminality was innate, a trait inherent in the offender's brain matter. While they were eventually repudiated as pseudo-scientists and self-deluded charlatans, today the pendulum has swung back. Both criminologists and biologists have begun to speak of a tantalizing but disturbing possibility: that criminality may be inherited as a set of genetic deficits that place one at risk for theft, violence, and sexual deviance. If that is so, we may soon confront proposals for genetically modifying "at risk" fetuses or doctoring up criminals so their brains operate like those of law-abiding citizens. In
The Criminal Brain, well-known criminologist Nicole Rafter traces the sometimes violent history of these criminological theories and provides an introduction to current biological theories of crime, or biocriminology, with predictions of how these theories are likely to develop in the future.
What do these new theories assert? Are they as dangerous as their forerunners, which the Nazis and other eugenicists used to sterilize, incarcerate, and even execute thousands of supposed "born" criminals? How can we prepare for a future in which leaders may propose crime-control programs based on biology? Enhanced with fascinating illustrations and written in lively prose, The Criminal Brain examines these issues in light of the history of ideas about the criminal brain. By tracing the birth and growth of enduring ideas in criminology, as well as by recognizing historical patterns in the interplay of politics and science, she offers ways to evaluate new theories of the criminal brain that may radically reshape ideas about the causes of criminal behavior.
Review
"Rafter's is a superb intellectual and cultural history of biological theories of crime, inspired by the author's desire to find "a new or third way" to integrate biological, sociological, and historical approaches to crime (251)...
Review
“Rafter impressively documents the genealogy of biological ideas in criminology. She shows that criminology must take new biological ideas seriously and contextualize sociologically both the ideas and the phenomena in which biologists engage. The Criminal Brain warrants thorough and broad discussion.”
-Joachim J. Savelsberg,co-author of Constructing White-Collar Crime: Rationalities, Communication, Power
Review
“Rafter is well known for her provocative and thoughtful work on the history of crime and criminal justice. In The Criminal Brain she tackles one of the most significant yet complex topics in the field today. As we witness new discoveries regarding the brain, genetics, consciousness, and human behavior, Rafter makes a persuasive case that we need to understand our past in order to chart our future course. I highly recommended Rafters book for criminological theorists and researchers alike.”
-John H. Laub,co-author of Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives: Delinquent Boys to Age 70
Review
“The Criminal Brain will have an important impact on social, political, and moral debates as biological criminology becomes increasingly prominent in coming years.”
-Simon A. Cole,author of Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification
Review
“The book takes readers on a fascinating journey through the history of criminology and details where the field stands today.“
-Scientific American,
Synopsis
The epidemic of mass rape in the former Yugoslavia has illustrated once again, and in particularly brutal fashion, the inextricable relationship between national politics, sexual politics, and body politics. The nexus of these three forces is highly charged in any culture, at any time in history, but especially so among cultures in which rapid, even cataclysmic, changes in material realities and national self-conceptions are eroding or overwhelming previously secure boundaries.
The postcommunist moment in the so-called Second World--Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union--has dramatically exposed the opportunities and dangers that arise when the political, cultural, and economic foundations of a society are de- and then re-structured. Gender roles and relations, expressions of sexuality or attempts to recontain them, representations of the body, especially the female body, and the larger, cultural meanings it assumes, are particularly marked sites to witness the performance of complex national dramas of crisis and change.
This groundbreaking volume turns its attention to the Second World, specifically to such subjects as the birth of the sex media and porn industry in Russia; Russian women and alcoholism; cinema in post-communist Hungary; patriotism and gender in Poland; sexual dissidence in Eastern Europe; and women in the former Yugoslavia.
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About the Author
Ellen E. Berry directs the Women's Studies Program at Bowling Green State University. She is author of Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein's Postmodernism and co-editor with Anesa Miller-Pogacar of Re-Entering the Sign: Articulating New Russian Culture.
Table of Contents
Bug inspectors and beauty queens : the problems of translating feminism into Russian -- Engendering the Russian body politic -- Women in Yugoslavia --Traditions of patriotism, questions of gender : the case of Poland -- Sex, subjectivity, and socialism : feminist discourses in East Germany -- Deciphering the body of memory : writing by former East German women writers -- New members and organs : the politics of porn -- Sex in the media and the birth of the sex media in Russia -- The underground closet : political and sexual dissidence in East European culture -- Ivan Soloviev's reflections on Eros -- Russian women writing alcoholism : the sixties to the present --Gendering cinema in postcommunist Hungary.