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"Presser, Lois"
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Been a Heavy Life
In this groundbreaking work, Lois Presser investigates the life
stories of men who have perpetrated violence. She applies insights
from across the academy to in-depth interviews with men who shared
their accounts of how they became the people we most fear--those
who rape, murder, assault, and rob, often repeatedly. Been a
Heavy Life provides the discipline of criminology with two
crucial frameworks: one for critically evaluating the construction
of offenders' own stories, and one for grasping the cultural
meta-narratives that legitimize violence. For social scientists
generally, this book offers a vivid demonstration of just how
dynamic and contingent self-narratives are.
eBook
Narrative Criminology as Critical Criminology
Narrative criminology is a theoretical paradigm rooted in a view of stories as influencing harmful actions and arrangements. Narrative criminologists explore the storied bases of a variety of harms and also consider the narratives with which actors resist patterns of harm. We submit that narrative criminology is an apt and powerful framework for research in critical criminology because narrative criminology is fundamentally concerned with harm or resistance to harm, underscores collective involvement in the genesis of harm, illuminates the dynamism of harm and therefore the possibilities of resistance, and compels a reflexive stance on one’s research. Stories are recounted at multiple levels of social life. They are self-consciously and habitually generated, structured and creative, populated by things said and things not said. The complexities of stories are a good match for the complexities of crime, harm and justice in late modernity—core concerns of critical criminology.
Journal Article
Narrative Criminology
Stories are much more than a means of communication-stories help us shape our identities, make sense of the world, and mobilize others to action. InNarrative Criminology, prominent scholars from across the academy and around the world examine stories that animate offending. From an examination of how criminals understand certain types of crime to be less moral than others, to how violent offenders and drug users each come to understand or resist their identity as 'criminals', to how cultural narratives motivate genocidal action, the case studies in this book cover a wide array of crimes and justice systems throughout the world.
The contributors uncover the narratives at the center of their essays through qualitative interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and written archives, and they scrutinize narrative structure and meaning by analyzing genres, plots, metaphors, and other components of storytelling. In doing so, they reveal the cognitive, ideological, and institutional mechanisms by which narratives promote harmful action. Finally, they consider how offenders' narratives are linked to and emerge from those of conventional society or specific subcultures. Each chapter reveals important insights and elements for the development of a framework of narrative criminology as an important approach for understanding crime and criminal justice. An unprecedented and landmark collection,Narrative Criminologyopens the door for an exciting new field of study on the role of stories in motivating and legitimizing harm.
eBook
Why We Harm
Criminologists are primarily concerned with the analysis of actions that violate existing laws. But a growing number have begun analyzing crimes as actions that inflict harm, regardless of the applicability of legal sanctions. Even as they question standard definitions of crime as law-breaking, scholars of crime have few theoretical frameworks with which to understand the etiology of harmful action.InWhy We Harm, Lois Presser scrutinizes accounts of acts as diverse as genocide, environmental degradation, war, torture, terrorism, homicide, rape, and meat-eating in order to develop an original theoretical framework with which to consider harmful actions and their causes. In doing so, this timely book presents a general theory of harm, revealing the commonalities between actions that impose suffering and cause destruction.Harm is built on stories in which the targets of harm are reduced to one-dimensional characters-sometimes a dangerous foe, sometimes much more benign, but still a projection of our own concerns and interests. In our stories of harm, we are licensed to do the harmful deed and, at the same time, are powerless to act differently. Chapter by chapter, Presser examines statements made by perpetrators of a wide variety of harmful actions. Appearing vastly different from one another at first glance, Presser identifies the logics they share that motivate, legitimize, and sustain them. From that point, she maps out strategies for reducing harm.
eBook
Violent Offenders, Moral Selves: Constructing Identities and Accounts in the Research Interview
This article considers the research interview as a site for the construction of identities. In recent decades, identity has been conceptualized as something forged through the telling of life stories. To the extent that storytelling is a situated process, self-identification is as well. Using data from qualitative interviews with men who perpetrated violent crimes, I describe the narrated identities of these men, and clarify ways in which the men assimilated the research interview into their narrated identities. First, the fact and the nature of the interview were used to signify something about the moral self. Second, many of the research participants solicited and/or inferred my evaluation of them. The evaluation provided an outside opinion that was invoked or rejected to make self-claims. Third, the moral self and struggle were enacted during the interview. The men used the interview to exclude themselves from a problematic social group, “violent offenders.” The research encounter was a venue for doing social problems work and social problems resistance.
Journal Article
Negotiating Power and Narrative in Research: Implications for Feminist Methodology
Presser conducts qualitative interviews with men who had committed serious violent crimes, including crimes against women--rape of girls and women assault and murder of female partners. He aims to understand men's self-presentations and accounts of violence.
Journal Article
“Not a Real Prostitute”: Narrative Imagination, Social Policy, and Care for Men who Sell Sex
The dominant cultural narrative of sex-selling involves female sellers and male buyers, consistent with governing notions of sexual desire and sexual performance more generally. Likewise, needing and receiving care is conventionally coded as feminine. Analysis of semi-structured qualitative interviews with 21 cisgender male sex sellers in Denmark leads us to consider how storylines and discursive boundaries having to do with sex work, sexuality, gender, and care shape narrative imagination in ways that inhibit the participation of male sex sellers in programs that provide the kind of care they may need. Respondents described different experiences of and pathways into sex work. However, both respondents who enjoyed selling sex as well as respondents who suffered found it difficult to imagine themselves as participants in service-providing programs. Rather, they deemed programs designed to provide care and support to sex sellers the exclusive province of women. The paper clarifies the importance of cultivating narrative imagination among male sex sellers, policymakers, and care providers in order to develop and deliver more adequate policies and effective programs for male sex sellers in need of care.
Journal Article