Crime, culture and visual methodologies: Ethno-mimesis as performative praxis

Introduction This chapter will discuss the importance of visual and performative methodologies to cultural criminology in helping to facilitate a better understanding of social issues and problems - such as sex work and anti asylumfeeling. Society, as Presdee argues (2000), is saturated by images of crime. The combination of social research and cultural analysis of fictive texts can give us a richer understanding of crime and deviance. We can also approach a more sensuous understanding of society and lived experience through an examination of fictive texts that emerge from social processes and practices. For example, in my second level sociology module we look at the detective novel to explain transgressive imaginations. Discussing the crime novel, Clarke asserts that 'rather than crime being an object of "repulsion" detective stories suggest that crime is simultaneously an object of fascination and attraction - an issue from which we gain pleasure' (2001: 101). Detective fiction therefore provides alternative 'ways of seeing' crime that can add to the ways we understand and imagine relationships between order and disorder.