Jody Miller
Biographic Data
| ID | 3580902 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jody Miller |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jody |
| FAMILY NAME | Miller |
| SIGNATURE | MILLER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Missouri–St. Louis |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 851 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 44 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Women’s Pathways to Incarceration in India and Sri Lanka
Despite their distinct histories and cultures, India and Sri Lanka often are characterized as reflecting a uniformly patriarchal “South Asian” culture. We draw from a project on women’s pathways to incarceration to interrogate such assumptions. Utilizing narrative life history interviews supplemented with information from life event calendars [LECs], we compare Indian ( N = 85) and Sri Lankan ( N = 96) women’s accounts of how gender and gender in…
The Playa’ and the Cool Pose
Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself
Gender ’n the ’Hood
Conclusions and Recommendations
Perspectives on Gender and Urban Violence
Playin’ Too Much
Getting Played
2010 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award from the American Sociological Association; Race, Gender, and Class Section 2008 Finalist, The Society for the Study of Social Problems C. Wright Mills Award Much has been written about the challenges that face urban African American young men, but less is said about the harsh realities for African American young women in disadvantaged communities. Sexual harassment, sexual assault, dating…
Comparative Cross-National Analyses of Domestic Violence
Domestic violence is a global phenomenon impacting countless lives. However, most research on the topic is anchored in the Global North. Using South Asia as a case study, we encourage further development of intersectional, comparative research. Such work brings us closer to understanding shared and divergent causes, patterns, and impacts of domestic violence within and across societies. The tendency to treat South Asia monolithically erases nuanc…
Quantifying Qualitative Scholarship
This paper describes our efforts to systematically generate knowledge from ethnographic and other qualitative scholarship as a way of bridging intellectual gaps found in quantitative research. We ground this scholarly endeavor in the study of gangs, which has a lengthy history in the field of criminology, yet lacks a coherent, coordinated, and comparative understanding of gang dynamics, behavior, and impacts. We discuss the importance of acknowle…
It’s Not Just the Drugs that are Difficult to Quit’
Research comparing crime desisters with persistent offenders has tended to find persisters to be a marginalized group who, for personal, interactional and/or structural reasons, are unable to break free from crime. On the basis of in-depth interviews with a group of empowered women drug dealers in Norway, this article suggests that the processes of psychological empowerment emerging within some individuals’ criminal success are an under-investiga…
Qualitative Research in Criminology
This volume investigates the significant role qualitative research plays in expanding and refining our understandings of crime and justice. It features seventeen original essays that discuss the relationship between methodology and theory. The result is a theoretically engaged volume that explores the approaches of qualitative scholars in the collection and treatment of data in criminological scholarship. Among the key issues addressed in the vol…
Criminology Reviewers List
Gender-Specific Conflicts among Urban African-American Youth
The literatures on violence among young men and young women have highlighted the importance of situational context. However, few studies have compared disputes that do not result in violence with those that do, and even fewer have been positioned to investigate the role situational context may play across gender in accounting for these outcomes. Drawing on recent scholarship on gender and violence, this research explores the situational contexts …
Case Study
Scholarship on race, crime, and justice often remains gender blind. Researchers cannot fully understand the influences of race and racism without serious consideration of its gendered dimensions. Distressed minority communities in urban settings have disproportionate rates of violence against women. Structural, organizational, and cultural characteristics heighten gendered risks, including high rates of other crime; male domination of public comm…
Case Study
In 2011, Georgia and Alabama passed laws that criminalized an immigrant presence, by restricting points of contact between undocumented immigrants and state resources and by heightening the consequences of immigrant encounters with law enforcement. Part of a wider devolution of immigration enforcement from the federal to the state level, legislation in both states reflected the South’s historically complex racial politics and created both extreme…
Inequalities of Race, Class, and Place and Their Impact on Postincarceration Higher Education
Postsecondary correctional education (PSCE) is witnessing a revitalization, offering the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated an important source of human and social capital. Yet, opportunities for higher education among this population are patterned by larger structural exclusions based on race, class, and place. In this article, we investigate the impact of race and class inequalities among students in a program for formerly incarcerated indi…
Gendered Carceral Regimes in Sri Lanka
Across time and place, semicarceral institutions extend the arms of the state to control women’s perceived moral and sexual transgressions. In this article, we examine the case of Sri Lanka, where the criminalization of women who participate in transactional sex is a prominent feature of gendered social control. We trace how vestiges of British colonial law intersect with Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, militarization, and the gendered liberalizati…
Transitory Mobility, Cultural Heterogeneity, and Victimization Risk Among Young Men of Color
The coupling of racial and economic stratification has been found to result in a range of adverse outcomes for youth of color, including disproportionate exposure to violence and victimization. Primary explanations of these patterns, particularly at the micro‐level, have focused on the impact of street culture. In this article, we draw from a multiyear ethnography in Cape Town, South Africa, to offer a theoretical elaboration of the place of cult…
Identity, sexuality and commercial sex among Sri Lankan nachchi
This study investigates the complex and contradictory ways in which gender identity, sexuality, and desire are configured in nachchi understandings of their lives in Sri Lanka. Nachchi was an insider term used by a group of sex workers best conceptualized using western understandings as both transgender and homosexual: nachchi celebrate their feminine gendered subjectivity, but also embrace key facets of their biological ‘maleness,’ and are arden…
American Cities and American Political Science—a Look at Thick Injustice
The back cover of Clarissa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom's Justice and the American Metropolis concisely lays out a central challenge of contemporary politics: “Today's American cities and suburbs are the sites of ‘thick injustice’—unjust power relations that are deeply and densely concentrated as well as opaque and seemingly intractable. Thick injustice is hard to see, to assign responsibility for, and to change.” The fact that the topic of “u…
Dramatic lives and relevant becomings
The article explores how violence works to produce young women’s precarious positions in social milieus characterized by multiple marginalization. By paying attention to the micropolitics of violent engagements we argue that violent conflicts can be viewed as strategies for escaping positions of marginality into positions of relevance. The analysis builds on empirical data from Copenhagen, Denmark, gained through ethnographic fieldwork with the p…
Precocious Role Entry as a Mediating Factor in Women's Methamphetamine Use
Precocious adoption of adult roles and responsibilities at an early age often has been linked to substance abuse and criminal behavior. Yet, much of the existing research suggests that early offending behaviors induce precocious movement into adulthood; less attention has focused on the way in which early adoption of adult roles and responsibilities might itself contribute to the onset of offending. In the following article, we examine the cumula…
Commentary on Heidensohn's ‘The deviance of women’
It's been just over forty years since the publication of Frances Heidensohn's 'The deviance of women' (1968). What a privilege to have the opportunity to reflect on the impact of this work, and to assess where we have honoured Heidensohn's calls to action and where we have fallen short. Let me begin with a telling confession. When Richard Wright first approached me about writing a commentary on 'The deviance of women', I hadn't previously read it…
Gang Fights versus Cat Fights
Scholarly accounts of young men's violence have remained remarkably consistent over time: the use of violence emerges in response to focal concerns that strongly emphasize autonomy, respect, and the defense of reputation, and is indicative of the import of hegemonic masculinities on the streets. Yet, despite persistent gender gaps in the use of violence, recent research suggests that young women use violence more often than commonly believed, and…
Young Black Men and Urban Policing in the United States
People of colour living in disadvantaged urban communities have been shown to be the disproportionate recipients of both proactive policing strategies and various forms of police misconduct. As a consequence, a growing body of research has begun to examine the relationship between blacks’ experiences with the police and their perceptions of police legitimacy. While urban minority young men are primary recipients of proactive policing efforts, few…
Getting Played
2010 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award from the American Sociological Association; Race, Gender, and Class Section 2008 Finalist, The Society for the Study of Social Problems C. Wright Mills Award Much has been written about the challenges that face urban African American young men, but less is said about the harsh realities for African American young women in disadvantaged communities. Sexual harassment, sexual assault, dating…
Gender, Race, and Urban Policing
Proactive policing strategies produce a range of harms to African Americans in poor urban communities. We know little, however, about how aggressive policing is experienced across gender by adolescents in these neighborhoods. The authors argue that important insights can be gained by examining the perspectives of African American youths and draw from in-depth interviews with youths in St. Louis, Missouri, to investigate how gender shapes interact…
Up It Up
Attempts to understand women's participation in violence have been plagued by a tendency either to overemphasize gender differences or to downplay the significance of gender. The goal of this research is to reconcile these approaches through an examination of the experiences of female and male street robbers in an urban setting. Based on in‐depth interviews with active offenders, the study compares women's and men's accounts of why they commit ro…
Gender, Neighborhood Danger, and Risk‐avoidance Strategies Among Urban African‐american Youths
Research consistently reveals that fear of crime and perceived risk are demographically and ecologically patterned. Women and individuals in disadvantaged community settings report increased fear and perceptions of risk. For women, these fears and perceptions are tied to concerns about sexual violence specifically, whereas for individuals in distressed neighborhoods, crime rates, “incivilities,” and poor police‐community relations are often ident…
The strengths and limits of ‘doing gender’ for understanding street crime
This paper is an engagement with Messerschmidt’s structured action theory, and more generally with feminist criminologists’ applications of the concept ‘doing gender’ for understanding street crime. Specifically, I investigate the ways in which the attribution of gender difference and the near exclusive emphasis on normative practices has limited our use of the doing gender model in theorizing gender and crime. I discuss several avenues for enhan…
Gender and Adolescent Relationship Violence
A growing body of research examines the problem of adolescent dating violence. In these studies, fairly high rates of female‐to‐male violence have been documented, leading to considerable debate about the role of gender in dating and other partner violence. Drawing from a broader qualitative study of violence in the lives of African‐American youths from a distressed urban community, we weigh in on this debate by providing a contextual examination…
Rape myths and violence against street prostitutes
The experiences of prostitutes have been missing from studies of violence and rape, as has the problem of violence from studies of prostitution. Interviews here with 16 street prostitutes, most of whom are crack users, reveal an enormous amount of rape and violence against these women. Further, it is found that rape myths generally discussed in the literature uniquely come together around prostitutes to fuel both the violence and the devaluation …
Gender and Power on the Streets
This article examines the relationships between street prostitutes and men on the streets who are not their clientele (pimps, drug dealers, and other drug users), in the context of the urban drug environment. The crack scene provides an important example of how gender relations shift and are reconstituted in changing environments. Women who engaged in sex-for-money exchanges on the streets to support their crack use defined themselves as independ…
The Impact of Sex Composition on Gangs and Gang Member Delinquency
Sociology of organizations scholars have long recognized sex and gender as key features shaping interactional dynamics within groups, and several recent qualitative studies suggest that sex composition of gangs helps shape the gang experience for both boys and girls. Quantitatively, we add to this scant literature by testing competing hypotheses from the theories of Kanter, Blau, and Blalock, and examining whether youth gangs' sex composition inf…
Crack Dealing, Gender, and Arrest Avoidance
Journal Article Crack Dealing, Gender, and Arrest Avoidance Get access Bruce A. Jacobs, Bruce A. Jacobs 1University of Missouri–St. Louis **Direct correspondence to Bruce Jacobs, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Missouri, St. Louis, 8001 Natural Bridge Road, St. Louis, Missouri 63121-4499. E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Jody Miller Jody …
Women's Participation in Chinese Transnational Human Smuggling
Despite extensive sociological research on gender and organizations, criminologists have paid insufficient attention to how organizational context and market demands may shape the extent and nature of women's participation in illicit enterprises. This study uses an organizational framework to examine the case of Chinese human smuggling to the United States. Drawing from interviews with 129 human smugglers, we propose a gendered market perspective…
Precocious Role Entry as a Mediating Factor in Women's Methamphetamine Use
Precocious adoption of adult roles and responsibilities at an early age often has been linked to substance abuse and criminal behavior. Yet, much of the existing research suggests that early offending behaviors induce precocious movement into adulthood; less attention has focused on the way in which early adoption of adult roles and responsibilities might itself contribute to the onset of offending. In the following article, we examine the cumula…
Gang Fights versus Cat Fights
Scholarly accounts of young men's violence have remained remarkably consistent over time: the use of violence emerges in response to focal concerns that strongly emphasize autonomy, respect, and the defense of reputation, and is indicative of the import of hegemonic masculinities on the streets. Yet, despite persistent gender gaps in the use of violence, recent research suggests that young women use violence more often than commonly believed, and…
Transitory Mobility, Cultural Heterogeneity, and Victimization Risk Among Young Men of Color
The coupling of racial and economic stratification has been found to result in a range of adverse outcomes for youth of color, including disproportionate exposure to violence and victimization. Primary explanations of these patterns, particularly at the micro‐level, have focused on the impact of street culture. In this article, we draw from a multiyear ethnography in Cape Town, South Africa, to offer a theoretical elaboration of the place of cult…
Violence and Coercion in Sri Lanka's Commercial Sex Industry
This study examines the local conditions facing commercial sex workers in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Based on findings from a 3-year field comparative field study, the author investigates the widespread nature of violence, coercion, and harassment against women and transgendered/gay men in an illicit sex market whose primary clientele are Sri Lankan men. Specifically, the author examines the relationship between cultural definitions of gender/sexuality …
Your Life is on the Line Every Night You're on the Streets”
Dramatic lives and relevant becomings
The article explores how violence works to produce young women’s precarious positions in social milieus characterized by multiple marginalization. By paying attention to the micropolitics of violent engagements we argue that violent conflicts can be viewed as strategies for escaping positions of marginality into positions of relevance. The analysis builds on empirical data from Copenhagen, Denmark, gained through ethnographic fieldwork with the p…
Gender-Specific Conflicts among Urban African-American Youth
The literatures on violence among young men and young women have highlighted the importance of situational context. However, few studies have compared disputes that do not result in violence with those that do, and even fewer have been positioned to investigate the role situational context may play across gender in accounting for these outcomes. Drawing on recent scholarship on gender and violence, this research explores the situational contexts …
Comparative Cross-National Analyses of Domestic Violence
Domestic violence is a global phenomenon impacting countless lives. However, most research on the topic is anchored in the Global North. Using South Asia as a case study, we encourage further development of intersectional, comparative research. Such work brings us closer to understanding shared and divergent causes, patterns, and impacts of domestic violence within and across societies. The tendency to treat South Asia monolithically erases nuanc…
It’s Not Just the Drugs that are Difficult to Quit’
Research comparing crime desisters with persistent offenders has tended to find persisters to be a marginalized group who, for personal, interactional and/or structural reasons, are unable to break free from crime. On the basis of in-depth interviews with a group of empowered women drug dealers in Norway, this article suggests that the processes of psychological empowerment emerging within some individuals’ criminal success are an under-investiga…
Commentary on Heidensohn's ‘The deviance of women’
It's been just over forty years since the publication of Frances Heidensohn's 'The deviance of women' (1968). What a privilege to have the opportunity to reflect on the impact of this work, and to assess where we have honoured Heidensohn's calls to action and where we have fallen short. Let me begin with a telling confession. When Richard Wright first approached me about writing a commentary on 'The deviance of women', I hadn't previously read it…
Reply To Messerschmidt
Inequalities of Race, Class, and Place and Their Impact on Postincarceration Higher Education
Postsecondary correctional education (PSCE) is witnessing a revitalization, offering the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated an important source of human and social capital. Yet, opportunities for higher education among this population are patterned by larger structural exclusions based on race, class, and place. In this article, we investigate the impact of race and class inequalities among students in a program for formerly incarcerated indi…
Your Life is on the Line Every Night You're on the Streets”
Wannabe
Gender and Power on the Streets
This article examines the relationships between street prostitutes and men on the streets who are not their clientele (pimps, drug dealers, and other drug users), in the context of the urban drug environment. The crack scene provides an important example of how gender relations shift and are reconstituted in changing environments. Women who engaged in sex-for-money exchanges on the streets to support their crack use defined themselves as independ…
Rape myths and violence against street prostitutes
The experiences of prostitutes have been missing from studies of violence and rape, as has the problem of violence from studies of prostitution. Interviews here with 16 street prostitutes, most of whom are crack users, reveal an enormous amount of rape and violence against these women. Further, it is found that rape myths generally discussed in the literature uniquely come together around prostitutes to fuel both the violence and the devaluation …
Crime and oppression
Gender and Victimization Risk among Young Women in Gangs
Research has documented the enhancement effects of gang involvement for criminal offending, but little attention has been given to victimization. This article examines how gang involvement shapes young women's risks of victimization. Based on interviews with active gang members, the author suggests that (1) gang participation exposes youths to victimization risk and (2) it does so in gendered ways. Young women can use gender to decrease their ris…
Up It Up
Attempts to understand women's participation in violence have been plagued by a tendency either to overemphasize gender differences or to downplay the significance of gender. The goal of this research is to reconcile these approaches through an examination of the experiences of female and male street robbers in an urban setting. Based on in‐depth interviews with active offenders, the study compares women's and men's accounts of why they commit ro…
Crack Dealing, Gender, and Arrest Avoidance
Journal Article Crack Dealing, Gender, and Arrest Avoidance Get access Bruce A. Jacobs, Bruce A. Jacobs 1University of Missouri–St. Louis **Direct correspondence to Bruce Jacobs, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Missouri, St. Louis, 8001 Natural Bridge Road, St. Louis, Missouri 63121-4499. E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Jody Miller Jody …
One of the Guys
The Impact of Sex Composition on Gangs and Gang Member Delinquency
Sociology of organizations scholars have long recognized sex and gender as key features shaping interactional dynamics within groups, and several recent qualitative studies suggest that sex composition of gangs helps shape the gang experience for both boys and girls. Quantitatively, we add to this scant literature by testing competing hypotheses from the theories of Kanter, Blau, and Blalock, and examining whether youth gangs' sex composition inf…
Reply To Messerschmidt
The strengths and limits of ‘doing gender’ for understanding street crime
This paper is an engagement with Messerschmidt’s structured action theory, and more generally with feminist criminologists’ applications of the concept ‘doing gender’ for understanding street crime. Specifically, I investigate the ways in which the attribution of gender difference and the near exclusive emphasis on normative practices has limited our use of the doing gender model in theorizing gender and crime. I discuss several avenues for enhan…
Violence and Coercion in Sri Lanka's Commercial Sex Industry
This study examines the local conditions facing commercial sex workers in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Based on findings from a 3-year field comparative field study, the author investigates the widespread nature of violence, coercion, and harassment against women and transgendered/gay men in an illicit sex market whose primary clientele are Sri Lankan men. Specifically, the author examines the relationship between cultural definitions of gender/sexuality …
The Modern Gang Reader
Gender and Adolescent Relationship Violence
A growing body of research examines the problem of adolescent dating violence. In these studies, fairly high rates of female‐to‐male violence have been documented, leading to considerable debate about the role of gender in dating and other partner violence. Drawing from a broader qualitative study of violence in the lives of African‐American youths from a distressed urban community, we weigh in on this debate by providing a contextual examination…
Gender, Crime, And (In)Justice
Young Black Men and Urban Policing in the United States
People of colour living in disadvantaged urban communities have been shown to be the disproportionate recipients of both proactive policing strategies and various forms of police misconduct. As a consequence, a growing body of research has begun to examine the relationship between blacks’ experiences with the police and their perceptions of police legitimacy. While urban minority young men are primary recipients of proactive policing efforts, few…
Gender, Race, and Urban Policing
Proactive policing strategies produce a range of harms to African Americans in poor urban communities. We know little, however, about how aggressive policing is experienced across gender by adolescents in these neighborhoods. The authors argue that important insights can be gained by examining the perspectives of African American youths and draw from in-depth interviews with youths in St. Louis, Missouri, to investigate how gender shapes interact…
Women's Participation in Chinese Transnational Human Smuggling
Despite extensive sociological research on gender and organizations, criminologists have paid insufficient attention to how organizational context and market demands may shape the extent and nature of women's participation in illicit enterprises. This study uses an organizational framework to examine the case of Chinese human smuggling to the United States. Drawing from interviews with 129 human smugglers, we propose a gendered market perspective…
Gender, Neighborhood Danger, and Risk‐avoidance Strategies Among Urban African‐american Youths
Research consistently reveals that fear of crime and perceived risk are demographically and ecologically patterned. Women and individuals in disadvantaged community settings report increased fear and perceptions of risk. For women, these fears and perceptions are tied to concerns about sexual violence specifically, whereas for individuals in distressed neighborhoods, crime rates, “incivilities,” and poor police‐community relations are often ident…
Commentary on Heidensohn's ‘The deviance of women’
It's been just over forty years since the publication of Frances Heidensohn's 'The deviance of women' (1968). What a privilege to have the opportunity to reflect on the impact of this work, and to assess where we have honoured Heidensohn's calls to action and where we have fallen short. Let me begin with a telling confession. When Richard Wright first approached me about writing a commentary on 'The deviance of women', I hadn't previously read it…
Gang Fights versus Cat Fights
Scholarly accounts of young men's violence have remained remarkably consistent over time: the use of violence emerges in response to focal concerns that strongly emphasize autonomy, respect, and the defense of reputation, and is indicative of the import of hegemonic masculinities on the streets. Yet, despite persistent gender gaps in the use of violence, recent research suggests that young women use violence more often than commonly believed, and…
Identity, sexuality and commercial sex among Sri Lankan nachchi
This study investigates the complex and contradictory ways in which gender identity, sexuality, and desire are configured in nachchi understandings of their lives in Sri Lanka. Nachchi was an insider term used by a group of sex workers best conceptualized using western understandings as both transgender and homosexual: nachchi celebrate their feminine gendered subjectivity, but also embrace key facets of their biological ‘maleness,’ and are arden…
American Cities and American Political Science—a Look at Thick Injustice
The back cover of Clarissa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom's Justice and the American Metropolis concisely lays out a central challenge of contemporary politics: “Today's American cities and suburbs are the sites of ‘thick injustice’—unjust power relations that are deeply and densely concentrated as well as opaque and seemingly intractable. Thick injustice is hard to see, to assign responsibility for, and to change.” The fact that the topic of “u…
Dramatic lives and relevant becomings
The article explores how violence works to produce young women’s precarious positions in social milieus characterized by multiple marginalization. By paying attention to the micropolitics of violent engagements we argue that violent conflicts can be viewed as strategies for escaping positions of marginality into positions of relevance. The analysis builds on empirical data from Copenhagen, Denmark, gained through ethnographic fieldwork with the p…
Psychology (31 works) · Sociology (30 works) · Criminology (29 works) · Political science (26 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (20 works) · Social Psychology (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Sex work and related issues (11 works)