Amanda Glasbeek - Böcker

In 1913, Toronto launched an experiment in feminist ideals: a woman's police court. The court offered a separate venue to hear cases that involved women and became a forum where criminalized women – prostitutes, vagrants, alcoholics, and thieves – met and struggled with the meaning of justice.This multifaceted portrait of the court's business and its people – from its inception by middle-class, maternal feminists to its demise in 1934, from the repeat offender to its controversial magistrate, Margaret Patterson – reveals the experiment's fundamental contradiction. The court was both a site for feminist adaptations of justice and a court empowered to punish the women who appeared on its docket.Feminized Justice sheds new light on maternal feminist politics, women and crime, and the role of resistance, agency, and experience in the justice system.

What is a crime and how do we construct it? The answers to these questions are complex and entangled in a web of power relations that require us to think differently about processes of criminalization and regulation. This book draws on Foucault's concept of governmentality as a lens to analyze and critique how crime is understood, reproduced, and challenged. It explores the dynamic interplay between practices of representation, processes of criminalization, and the ways that these circulate to both reflect and constitute crime and "justice."