Rationale

Born from the seminal work of the Chicago School (Becker, 1985), the concept of career has fueled research on deviance or delinquency in multiple ways. From the study of the formation of gangs (Mohammed, 2011), to practice analysis (Mauger, 2009) and work on desistance from crime (Farall et al., 2014), it has helped recognize norm-transgressing behaviours as processes, as opposed to a binary and contingent view centered on the commission of the act. By focusing on the mechanisms of labelling, stigmatization, and differentiation that are involved in the production and enforcement of the law, the career concept has emphasized the need to consider the ways in which society reacts to different kinds of illegalisms (Robert, 1973). In this sense, the career concept articulates temporal and institutional dimensions that are inseparable when apprehending the relationship between norms and behaviours.

Beyond this field of study, the concept of career has also been, since Hughes (1958), widely used in the sociology of work (Hatzfeld, 2004; Arborio, 2013) and of activism (Agrikoliansky, 2017; Fillieule, 2020). While some of these studies articulate this concept with the analysis of gender relations (Guillaume, Pochic 2007; Laufer, 2004; Rétif, 2013), this combination remains rare in the sociology of delinquency and criminal institutions, in the French-speaking world at least. Indeed, whereas there has been a trend of feminist research in criminology in the English-speaking world since the 1970s and 1980s, with its own specialized journals (Feminist Criminology; Women & Criminal Justice), French-language publications that attempt to problematize, and even theorize, gender relations in the field of criminal studies have remained marginal (Ricordeau, 2019). However, the pivotal role played by Canadian researchers who have long endeavoured to bring English- and French-language feminist research into conversation is commendable as illustrated by the feature in Déviance et Société entitled "Femmes et droit pénal" in 1992 (Déviance et Société, 1992), and the same year in the journal Criminologie "Les femmes et le contrôle pénal, questions féministes" (Criminologie, 1992).

The widely shared acknowledgement of women's prolonged invisibility in the research on crime and criminality (Parent, 1992) has mainly led to publications focusing on women. There is now a great deal of empirical research on women viewed as deviant. For example, a 2009 special section in Interrogations focused on "Forms, figures and representations of female deviance" (including an article on juvenile delinquency), and a 2011 special section in Champ Pénal/Penal Field on "the social control of violent women". Over the past decade, various publications in history, sociology or political science have focused on violent women (Cardi, Pruvost, 2012; Bugnon, 2015; Boutron, 2019), institutionalized adolescent girls, (Lemercier, 2017; Blanchard, 2019) or convicted (Barbier, 2016; Bugnon, 2018) and incarcerated adult women (Chetcuti- Osorovitz, 2021; Joël, 2017).

From a different angle, gender and criminality have also converged through the focus on gender-based violence (Delage et al., 2019), in line with analyses involving the "continuum of sexual violence" (Kelly, 2019) and quantitative surveys which took stock of this mass phenomenon (Enveff, 2001; Brown et al., 2021). Among other things, this has led to research on the public policies in this area (Boussaguet, 2008; Herman, 2016; Delage, 2017) and on how these offenses are controlled by criminal and medico-social institutions (Oddone, 2020; Pérona, 2017; Saetta, 2016). On the other hand, the careers of the male perpetrators of this type of violence, and those of the women and children who are its victims, remain largely unexplored so far, as do the issues raised by assessing the connections between victimization and delinquent careers, particularly in the case of incarcerated women (Potter, 2006; Prison Reform Trust, 2017).

Finally, one should mention the rise of feminist approaches to law, resulting from exchanges with feminist legal studies and legal gender studies, which intersect with some of the issues in this special section. Thus, while two issues of Nouvelles Questions Féministes dealt specifically with "gender law(s)" in 2009 and 2010 (NQF, 2009; NQF, 2010), Coline Cardi and Anne-Marie Devreux presented the feature "Gender and Law: a coproduction” (Cahiers du Genre, 2014) by stating that "the law does not only produce discrimination, it primarily produces differentiation and, in the process, it produces gender" (Cardi, Devreux, 2014).

Feminist research on crime and criminality therefore appears essential to incorporate gender issues into studies on delinquency which are often blinded by the predominantly male prison population and prone to the traditional androcentric biases of male-dominated disciplines (Cook 2016). In an effort to bolster this perspective, this special section will include a translation of "Feminism and criminology," the article published by Kathleen Daly and Meda Chesney-Lind in 1988.

The development of these studies at the crossroads of criminal studies and gender studies has made it possible to problematize how gender relations work and what their effects are. In doing so, it has allowed us to move beyond the still very common conception of gender as merely a civil status variable, one that is transparent and based on a binary division of biological sex considered to be natural and unsurpassable (Delphy, 2013; Mathieu, 2013). Indeed, the concept of gender (in the singular) makes it possible "to shift the focus from the divided parts to the principle of partition itself" and to the "notion of hierarchy" that goes with it (Delphy, 2013, 227). However, many of the French-language publications that use the career concept tend to ignore gender relations – whereas class relations, for instance, are explicitly problematized – while English-language publications that offer a gendered approach to delinquency rarely incorporate the concept of career (although qualitative research comes close because of its interest in life paths).

If the separate mobilization of the concepts of gender and career has made it possible to deepen and update the sociology of delinquency in many respects, the originality of this issue of Champ Pénal/Penal Field consists in combining these two concepts operationally, in such a way as to capitalize on their joint contributions through empirical research. This involves questioning the different dimensions of delinquent careers through the prism of a relational approach to gender, which not only focuses on women but also seeks to approach men as a gendered social group, specific and constructed in and through the relationship to women as a social group (Connell, 2014; Thiers-Vidal, 2010).

Feminist research has "amply demonstrated that men and women do not easily fit into these dichotomous categories and that, to be valid, feminist analysis itself must avoid the pitfall of reifying gender relations" (Parent, 1992).

This will allow to look afresh at the already well-known contributions of interactionist perspectives to the sociology of delinquency, based on their theoretical and methodological affinities with feminist approaches to gender and intersectionality because of their shared constructivist dimension. With a particular focus on the incorporation of social and criminal norms, as well as on the processes of labelling, regulation, and adaptation they generate, the career concept proves to be truly heuristic for a detailed examination and reconstruction of biographical trajectories that considers the weight of the constraints placed on individuals by structural relations of domination (Darmon, 2008; Rétif, 2013).

Among the themes and objects of study that may be addressed by the articles in this special section, the following indicative avenues of research can be considered separately or in conjunction with one or more others:

• Analysing gendered socializations and delinquent careers through the prism of different gender norms of reference in different social contexts (family, location, class, ethnicity and race, etc.).

• Examining the processes of labelling, the issuance of gender norms, and the othering or normalization processes within the penal field, for example, through the "institutional production of gender norms" (Vuattoux, 2021).

• Situating delinquent careers within the context of economic relationships that are also gendered. For example: the structure of the housing market, the formal/informal labour market and domestic work, access to legal financial resources (Sered and Norton-Hawk, 2021).

• Identifying the impact of the processes of criminalization/decriminalization of behaviours that are deemed deviant from the dominant gendered order on the construction of delinquent careers: e.g., the criminalization of homosexuality, prostitution, the criminalization or decriminalization of abortion depending on the national context, the repression of feminist and/or LGBT+ mobilizations; but also the dialectic between the criminalization of "deviances" and forms of individual and/or collective resistance to the gendered order (Gossett, Gossett, Lewis 2011).

• Exploring further the methodological and theoretical questions raised by the analysis of delinquent careers through the prism of gender and other social relations.

Article proposals may rely on different methodologies and be rooted in different disciplines (sociology, political science, anthropology, history, etc.) and fields. However, we expect papers that are based on recent empirical research and explain their methodology and data. Proposals for reviews of books (including those published in languages other than English or French) dealing with the themes of this special section are also welcome.

Calendar

Article proposals (maximum length 3000 characters / 500 words) are expected to contain a title, a summary presenting the thesis of the article, a brief description of the methodological approach and the main results.

• Proposals must be sent by February 25, 2022.

• Selected articles will be anounced on March 11, 2022.

• Final articles must be sent by June 17, 2022 Publication in the first semester of 2023.

Send your proposal to : picot.pauline[at]orange.fr; xavier.de-larminat[at]univ-rouen.fr

Formatting guidelines for the journal Champ Pénal/Penal Field are available here : https://journals.openedition.org/champpenal/7625