Private gun ownership for self-defense remains a major personal and public issue in the United States, driven by concerns about crime, vulnerability and a range of ‘ideological’ factors, including race and gender. As media attention centres upon the extent to which women are taking up firearms, with the gun lobby and firearms manufacturers celebrating the ‘new armed woman’, and guns being promoted as ‘Rape Prevention Kits’, this book explores the changing gendered aspects of gun ownership.
Can ownership of firearms by women be considered, as some have claimed, the embodiment of what might be termed ‘pioneer feminism’, as women resist male violence in a dangerous world, or are different stories told by the prominence of women in firearms control campaigns, or the fact that women remain frequent victims of male gun ownership? Analysing representations of the ‘armed woman’ in firearm and gun lobby marketing and advertising campaigns, together with television and popular music forms, Gender and Firearms: My Body, My Choice, My Gun examines the directions taken in the public debate on weaponisation in the United States, considering the role of women in the politics of gun safety and gun control. The book draws on statistical evidence in order to shed light on trends in gun ownership, whilst engaging with feminist scholarship on the relationship between gender, violence, risk and vulnerabilities, thus opening up critical new debates surrounding identity, performance, gender and risk in contemporary societies.
As such the book will be of likely interest to sociologists and scholars of sociology, criminology, and cultural and media studies with interests in gender, embodiment, risk, crime and violence.
1 Introduction: Opening shots and signs of change
The criminologists’ question
Arms and the woman
2 Rights speak and responsibilisation: Gun advertising, feminism and the production of the woman gun-carrier
Written with Jayne Raisborough
Introduction: Gender and choice
Promotional culture
The particularity of the gun in promotional culture
Taking the ladies to market
Fem-vertising firearms
The appropriation of feminism
Fem-vertising in the gunscape
Promoting the responsibilised female gun- carrier
Is the new femininity Neoliberal Feminism?
Conclusion
3 Packing pretty: Towards the armed action women
Not so exceptional: Real women, real guns
Gun publishing and gender questions
The well- armed woman
4 The weaponised women of the movies
Written with Hannah Frith
Art and life: ‘All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun’ Jean- Luc Godard
Shooting straight? Female action heroines,empowerment and sexualisation Real women, reel women?
Packing heat: Muscularity, weaponised prosthetics and the female shooter Kick-ass babes
Guns as sexualised objects
Postfeminist sexuality?
Conclusion
5 Personal choices and public consequences
Perfect storm/ market opportunity: Guns and the punitive turn
The best defense in a worst case scenario?
Firearm epiphanies
6 Numbers games
Beyond the hype this time?
Evidence, smoke and mirrors
The big picture: The national gun stock
New owners and changing motivations
Recycling and narrating new gun ownership
The ‘Trump Slump’ and the pandemic surge
Politics, race and the new gun buyers
7 Doctrine versus practice: Contradictions of gun ownership and ‘Stand Your Ground’ for women
Doctrine and reality
One self- defense rule for men, another for women’ (Franks, 2014: 1123)
The wider public debate
Disarming abusers?
8 Concluding themes, other women and looking forwards
Biography
Peter Squires is Professor (Emeritus) of criminology and public policy at the University of Brighton, United Kingdom. His research interests include gun crime and gun control; youth crime and disorder; anti-social behaviour; weapons, crime, and violence; community safety; crime prevention; surveillance and policing. He is the author of Gun Culture or Gun Control: Firearms, Violence and Society (Routledge, 2000) and Gun Crime in Global Contexts (Routledge, 2014), Rethinking Knife Crime (2021) and the co-author of Shooting to Kill: Policing Firearms and Armed Response (2010) and several other books.
