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4 books match the query 'Chancer, Lynn S.'
Erich Fromm and Critical Criminology
Beyond the Punitive SocietyEdited by Kevin Anderson and Richard Quinney
University of Illinois Press, 2000
Linking the writings of the great humanist psychologist Erich Fromm to criminology, this collection shows how viewing crime patterns and the criminal justice system from Fromm's humanist perspective opens a path to more effective and more humane ways of understanding and dealing with crime and criminals.
Contributors to Erich Fromm and Critical Criminology draw on Fromm's writings on alienation, sadomasochism, and patriarchal/matriarchal values to assess the kinds of crimes being committed and the kinds of people committing them. They explore the spiritual and intellectual sources of Fromm's thought--including Jewish theology, Freudian psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Buddhism--and demonstrate how his socialist humanism points toward a society free of crime and violence. This volume also includes translations of two of Fromm's early articles on criminal justice, never before available in English, in which he develops a psychoanalytic Marxist critique of the role of criminal justice in a class society.
At a time when American society seems bent, to an unprecedented degree, on imprisonment, executions, and other violent responses to the problem of crime, Fromm's humanist critique offers a unique vantage point from which to renew and develop a critical criminology.
High-Profile Crimes
When Legal Cases Become Social CausesLynn S. Chancer
University of Chicago Press, 2005
An astute and incisive chronicle of some of the most polarizing cases of the 1980s and 1990s, High-Profile Crimes shows that their landmark status results from the overlapping interaction of diverse participants. The merging of legal cases and social causes, Chancer argues, has wrought ambivalent effects on both social movements and the law. On the one hand, high-profile crimes offer important opportunities for emotional expression and raise awareness of social issues. But on the other hand, social problems cannot be resolved through the either/or determinations that are the goals of the legal system, creating frustration for those who look to the outcome of these cases for social progress. Guilt or innocence through the lens of the media leads to either defeat or victory for a social cause-a confounding situation that made the O. J. Simpson case, for example, unable to resolve the issues of domestic violence and police racism that it had come to symbolize.
Based on nearly two hundred interviews, Chancer's discussions of the infamous Central Park jogger and Bensonhurst cases-as well as the rape trials of William Kennedy Smith and Mike Tyson, the assault cases of Rodney King and Reginald Denny, and, finally, the O. J. Simpson murder trial-provide a convincing, multidimensional and innovative analysis of the most charged public dramas of the last two decades.
Philosophy, Crime, and Criminology
Edited by Bruce A. Arrigo and Christopher R. Williams
University of Illinois Press, 2006
Charting a provocative and original direction, editors Bruce A. Arrigo and Christopher R. Williams couple theoretically oriented chapters with those centered on application and case study. In doing so, they develop an insightful, sensible, and accessible approach for a philosophical criminology in step with the political and economic challenges of the twenty-first century. Revealing the ways in which philosophical conceits inform prevailing conceptions of crime, Philosophy, Crime, and Criminology is required reading for any serious student or scholar concerned with crime and its impact on society and in our lives.
Sadomasochism in Everyday Life
The Dynamics of Power and PowerlessnessChancer, Lynn S.
Rutgers University Press, 1992
Lynn Chancer advances the provocative thesis that sadomasochism is far more prevalent in contemporary societies like the United States than we realize. According to Chancer, sexual sadomasochism is only the best-known manifestation of what is actually a much more broadly based social phenomenon. Moving from personal relationships to school, the workplace, and other interactions, Chancer uses a variety of examples that are linked by a recurrent pattern of behavior. She goes beyond the predominantly individualistic and psychological explanations generally associated with sadomasochism (including those popularized in the "how to" literature of the recent Women Who Love Too Much genre) toward a more sociological interpretation. Chancer suggests that the structure of societies organized along male-dominated and capitalistic lines reflects and perpetuates a sadomasochistic social psychology, creating a culture steeped in everyday experiences of dominance and subordination.
In the first part of the book, Chancer discusses the prevalence of sadomasochistic cultural imagery in contemporary America and examines sadomasochism through several perspectives. She develops a set of definitional traits both through existential analysis of an instance of S/M sex and by incorporating a number of Hegelian and psychoanalytic concepts. In the second part of the book, she places sadomasochism in a broader context by exploring whether and how it appears in the workplace and how it relates to gender and race.