{"id":2067,"date":"2019-06-10T08:00:41","date_gmt":"2019-06-10T13:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/?p=2067"},"modified":"2019-06-13T19:10:40","modified_gmt":"2019-06-14T00:10:40","slug":"queering-criminality-and-victimization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/2019\/06\/10\/queering-criminality-and-victimization\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cQueering\u201d Criminality and Victimization"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Photo by Fred:, Flickr CC<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Originally published June 22, 2018.<\/em><\/p>\n

The 2017 critically-acclaimed documentary <\/span>Check It<\/span><\/i><\/a>\u00a0depicts the lives of a group gay and transgender youth from Washington D.C., who create a gang to help protect themselves from bullying and violence in their community. Although the film claims that the <\/span>Check It<\/span><\/i> group is \u201cthe only gay gang documented in America, maybe even the world,\u201d evidence suggests that gay gang members may be more common. While research on crime typically portrays gang members as predominantly heterosexual men of color, such visions of gang life have overlooked the experiences of gay gang members. Recent scholarship attempts to incorporate LGBT voices into our understandings of gangs and violence, and move past the often one-sided depictions of LGBT people as victims of hate crimes. <\/span><\/p>\n

Although researchers have been studying the hate crime victimization of gay men, and to a lesser extent other LGBT identities, they often limit queer experiences as passive or lacking agency. Evidence suggests that various intersections of a LGBT person\u2019s identity including race, class, and gender identity, influence both their likelihood of being victims of hate crimes and their perceptions of the harmful impacts of the victimization experience itself. Scholars also critique hate crime politics and legislation for treating queer violence as individualized and abnormal, rather than highlighting the systematic ways that LGBT people are oppressed and excluded in mainstream society that facilitates this violence.<\/h5>\n