Selected Academic Publications
On Trans Issues
Transphobic Discourse and Moral Panic Convergence: A Content Analysis of My Hate Mail
Allyn Walker (2023)
Recently, new social anxieties about transgender people have begun to emerge, framed as an issue of “grooming”—a term typically used in the context of child sexual abuse. In this way, moral panic about transgender people seems to be merging with oft-repeated social fears about pedophilia, resulting not only in policies criminalizing trans people and their allies but also in escalating hatred and threats toward trans-affirming educators. This pattern requires further inquiry. As a trans academic who has been at the center of moral panic, my own hate mail can provide material for this exploration. I conducted a content analysis of 231 letters and e-mails sent to me containing messages of hate, to answer the following research questions:
What beliefs and understandings did my correspondents indicate having about me and my research?
To what extent did my correspondents’ beliefs and understandings about me reflect intersecting contemporary moral panics around trans and queer people, pedophilia, and educators?
What stated or implied goals did my correspondents aim to achieve by writing to me?
The findings of this study can add to understanding of how moral panics can converge, and the consequences of their convergence for marginalized groups in academia and beyond.
Similar Past, Different Future? How Feminist and Queer Criminological Pedagogy and Qualitative Methods Intersect and Diverge
Vanessa R. Panfil, Amanda M. Petersen, Allyn Walker, Aimee Wodda (2022)
While feminist and queer epistemologies in criminology have similar origins, dissimilarities based on key dimensions exist, with significant impacts for qualitative methods and methods education. Our article first explores approaches to qualitative methods that generally overlap between feminist and queer epistemologies, such as social change goals, common research methods, and intersectional analyses. We then focus on two broad examples to demonstrate how queer criminology and second-wave feminism diverge. Several recent incidents have crystallized a distinction between transgender inclusivity within queer criminology and transgender exclusivity motivated by trans-exclusionary radical feminism within feminist criminology. We also highlight sex-positive criminological approaches situated within queer criminology, which advocate broadly for decriminalization and harm reduction, compared to second-wave feminist approaches that view considerations of sex and sexuality differently. Lastly, we discuss topics that represent both convergence and divergence, such as the radical possibilities of both feminist and queer criminologies for abolitionist scholarship and methodology, while noting recent examples of the ways criminologists have or have not explored these possibilities. Throughout, we connect the theoretical and the methodological, illustrating the practical realities these similarities and dissimilarities lead to in qualitative research. Our discussion is rooted in principles of inclusive and intersectional pedagogy.
Building an Intersectional and Trans-Inclusive Criminology: Responding to the Emergence of “Gender Critical” Perspectives in Feminist Criminology
Jace Valcore, Henry F. Fradella, Xavier Guadalupe Diaz, Matthew J. Ball, Angela Dwyer, Christina DeJong, Allyn Walker, Aimee Wodda, Meredith G. F. Worthen (2021)
This article responds to claims advanced by “gender critical” feminists, most recently expressed in a criminological context by Burt (2020) in Feminist Criminology, that the Equality Act—a bill pending in the United States Congress—would place cisgender women at risk of male violence in sex-segregated spaces. We provide legal history, empirical research, and conceptual and theoretical arguments to highlight three broad errors made by Burt and other trans-exclusionary feminists. These include: (1) a misinterpretation of the Equality Act; (2) a narrow version of feminism that embraces a socially and biologically deterministic view of sex and gender; and (3) ignorance and dismissal of established criminological knowledge regarding victimization, offending patterns, and effective measures to enhance safety. The implications of “gender critical” arguments for criminology, and the publication of such, are also discussed.
Experiences of Trans Scholars in Criminology and Criminal Justice
Allyn Walker, Jace Valcore, Brodie Evans, Ash Stephens (2021)
Trans individuals experience disproportionately high rates of victimization, discrimination and disparate treatment by the criminal processing system, as well as misrepresentation by the media. The importance and validity of studying transgender people’s experiences in the criminal processing system is beginning to be highlighted in criminology and criminal justice (CCJ), while the experiences of trans academics—who are among those leading the push toward the amplification of this line of research—remain largely unexplored. The authors, four transmasculine scholars in CCJ, draw from auto-ethnographic methods to shed light on the experiences of trans scholars within the academy and, in particular, within CCJ. We highlight how being trans has affected our experiences in various capacities as academics. We conclude by presenting suggestions for transgender scholars and their cisgender colleague and administrator allies.
On Minor-Attracted People (MAPs)
“I Would Report It Even If They Have Not Committed Anything”: Social Service Students’ Attitudes Toward Minor-Attracted People
Allyn Walker, Robert Butters, Erin Nichols (2021)
This study explores future mental health providers’ assumptions about minor-attracted people, using data from a survey of 200 students preparing for entry into social service professions at a public university in the state of Utah. Survey results show that more than half of the students believe clients who identify themselves as pedophiles must be automatically reported to the police, which has implications for providers’ understandings about the term “pedophile,” as well as their knowledge of guidelines for when clinicians may break client confidentiality. This belief was not significantly affected by taking ethics courses, nor courses that discussed mandated reporting guidelines. Despite this finding, 91% of students did not believe that they would need to report a client who had attractions to children, but who had never committed a sexual offense against a child. The majority of students indicated a willingness to work with minor-attracted clients, and commonly indicated in comments that they wanted more information about MAPs and when to break client confidentiality in their programs of study. Study results indicate a need for education among social service students about these issues.
“I’m Not like That, So Am I Gay?” The Use of Queer-Spectrum Identity Labels Among Minor-Attracted People
Allyn Walker (2019)
Largely based on an erroneous belief that individuals who are preferentially attracted to minors are necessarily sex offenders, queer communities have distanced themselves from this population over the past several decades. There are now those who object to the use of labels such as “gay” and “queer” by minor-attracted people (MAPs), raising the question,“to whom do queer-spectrum identity labels belong?” I engage with this question using data from my research with 42 MAPs, exploring their uses of queer-spectrum identity labels and the conflicts they have encountered regarding their use of these terms. I then discuss the potential consequences of accepting the use of these labels by MAPs.
Minor Attraction: A Queer Criminological Issue
Allyn Walker, Vanessa R. Panfil (2017)
Despite a cultural tendency to sexualize youth, individuals who are primarily attracted to minors are subject to suspicion and stigma across society, extending into criminology and criminal justice. The prevailing assumption is that minor-attracted persons (MAPs) are mentally ill and predatory. However, there exists evidence that minor attraction is a sexual orientation, and the parallels between the treatment of MAPs and LGBT populations are striking. Employing queer criminology’s use of deconstructionist techniques, we address the current state of criminology and criminal justice, which sees MAPs as a suspect population warranting formal control. We then argue for the use of queer criminology as a framework for future research with minor-attracted populations, which could have important implications for criminal justice practice and policy.
On Abolishing Police and Prisons
Now Is Always the Right Time to Work Toward Police and Prison Abolition
Allyn Walker (2023)
Lately when I talk with criminologists about abolishing police and prisons, I’ve been hearing a recurring response: “I believe the system should be abolished, but abolition is too long-term a goal to focus on. People need help now.” This perspective suggests that working toward abolition is impractical as an issue of timing, pitting abolitionist goals against reforms that these criminologists argue have the ability to immediately reduce systemic violence caused by the criminal punishment system.
When I hear arguments about a need to focus on immediate reforms rather than abolishing the entire system, I wonder what our society would look like today if previous, successful abolitionist movements had given way instead to reform. Take, for instance, the movement to abolish the practice of institutionalizing people in long-stay psychiatric hospitals (see Ben-Moshe, 2020). Deinstitutionalization resulted in mass closings of these facilities, reducing the number of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities held in state mental hospitals by 80% from 1955 to 2000. Without work urging the abolition of this dehumanizing confinement—work engaged in by scholars such as sociologist Erving Goffman—how many more hundreds of thousands of people would be involuntarily confined to psychiatric hospitals and large residential institutions?
Police Do Not Protect Us, and Other Lessons I Learned As a Queer Victim
Allyn Walker (2023)
In this essay, I recount the details of an assault I experienced in early 2010, while I was a graduate student living in New York City. Following my description of the assault, I describe my experiences with the police who responded to my 911 call, and my disappointment at my available options for “justice.” I also discuss my positionality as a white, queer victim, while exploring what justice for my experiences may have looked like for me.
Why Don’t We Center Abolition In Queer Criminology?
Allyn Walker, Amanda M. Petersen, Aimee Wodda, and Ash Stephens (2022)
In the last decade, queer criminology has emerged as a subfield of criminological research related to the experiences of LGBTQIA+ individuals in the criminal legal context. Particular attention has been given to understanding LGBTQIA+ individuals as survivors of interpersonal violence, as subjects of carceral control, and as workers within the criminal legal system. Preceding and concurrent with the development of this subfield, humanistic and legal scholars outside criminology have worked to produce intersectional theorizations of queer, trans, and racial justice within and beyond the criminal legal system. However, despite the similarities between these scholarly traditions, numerous tenets of the latter literature have not been widely recognized by or integrated into queer criminological scholarship.
In this article, we consider why intersectional humanistic and legal scholarship outside criminology has not been widely integrated within queer criminological scholarship, as well as why and how queer criminologists might more pointedly engage with this literature. We especially focus on how the concept of abolition has been mobilized in non-criminological theorizations of queer, trans, Black feminist, and racial justice, and how and why extending this concept into the queer criminological literature could enhance queer criminological scholarship and positively shape queer criminology’s legacy.
Punishing Migration, Punishing Trans Lives: The Detention of Transgender Asylum-Seekers in ICE Facilities
Allyn Walker (forthcoming)
Toward the end of 2018, thousands of migrants traveling to the United States from Central America began to make international headlines. Among them was a group of transgender women, who planned to apply for asylum once they arrived. Instead of being given the protection they sought, they, like so many other asylum-seekers in recent years, have been subjected to detention in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities while they wait for their asylum cases to be resolved. More trans women have joined them since 2018. Despite the detention of asylum-seekers in correctional facilities across the United States, immigration detention has yet to become a major focus within criminal justice scholarship.
While the detention of asylum-seekers is certainly not limited to trans women, trans women may have unique motivations for seeking asylum within the US, and experience unique maltreatment within ICE detention. In this chapter, I explore the challenges faced by trans women in Central America, and describe the abuses that trans asylum-seekers face in migrant detention. I also critique the lack of response to the harms done to asylum-seekers in the United States, both within the criminal justice field and within the United States more broadly. Finally, I join the call issued by immigrant rights activists and abolitionists to end migrant detention in its entirety.
Link to article available on publication