Abstract
Research on gangs and urban communities has often focused on gang members’ alleged fatalism and corresponding lack of aspirations for the future. Relatedly, theories and research regarded as criminological canon can lead to assumptions and misrepresentations that are damaging and dehumanizing. Using examples from an interview-based and partially ethnographic study with gay and bisexual male gang members, I explore their goals for the future, in depth and in context. These men had detailed, specific, and normative goals, such as gaining fulfilling employment, educational attainment, and healthy families, as well as existential goals. Their well-formulated goals demonstrate how cultural messages and mainstream research assumptions can prime gang researchers to overlook or misinterpret our participants’ own motives and meanings. This can be overcome by including gang-involved study participants in the research process and adopting an ethical standpoint of pursuing contextualized, humanistic portrayals of gang-involved people.
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Notes
I do not intend to engage in bisexual erasure when I primarily refer to participants simply as “gay” men. Rather, this mirrors their speech patterns and meaning systems; “gay” was used as meaningful shorthand and an umbrella term. Even the bisexual participants referred to themselves as “gay” at least sometimes, and usually they spoke of queer-related constructs in ways that recognized being gay or bisexual as very different from being heterosexual.
A total of 53 participants were interviewed for the study, all of whom had engaged in illegal activity as part of a group, but five of them did not consider these groups to be gangs. Because this Special Issue is focused on critical gang studies, only the interviews with the self-identified current or former gang members are analyzed here. However, I acknowledge that “lower-class focal concerns” theory has been used to make assumptions about various groups of structurally disadvantaged and/or crime-involved people, and exploring the goals of nongang youth and adults is important as well.
In fact, they shared with me their plans to avoid risks—including that of dying—when engaging in illegal behaviors that carried some risk, such as using condoms when selling sex to avoid contracting HIV, strategies of vetting potential clients to reduce the likelihood of victimization, and avoiding using certain drugs that they thought were more likely to harm them. The men in my study who were HIV-positive were concerned about a shortened life due to illness, but several had sought antiretroviral therapies and were actively managing their health.
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Acknowledgements
Data collection was supported in part by two awards from the University at Albany’s Initiatives for Women. An early version of this manuscript was presented to the Richard B. Atkinson LGBTQ Law & Policy Program Colloquium Series at the University of Arkansas School of Law; I thank Professor Jordan Blair Woods and the student participants for their constructive comments. I also thank special issue co-editors David Brotherton and Louis Kontos for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article, and for their patience and understanding.
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Panfil, V.R. “Ask Me About My Goals!” Challenging Pervasive Assumptions of Gang Members’ Fatalism by Exploring Gay Gang Members’ Goals. Crit Crim 30, 71–93 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-022-09630-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-022-09630-3