Women's criminality,criminal women,criminalized women? Questions in and for a feminist perspective

Although the notion of taking gender into account in social analyses has been around for some time, for the large partit has not been taken seriously by criminologists. In this article, Laberge shows how the neglect of women's criminality has been to the detriment of criminological inquiry. Through an examination of the questions usually asked about women in contact with the penal system, the author takes us beyond an ‘additive’ approach to explaining crime. Reorganizing these questions, she outlines a number of analytical distinctions that will transform our understanding of criminalized women, specifically, and criminological inquiry, generally.