Queer matters in criminology

This special issue addresses the need for a critical and collective response to the growing hostility faced by queer and trans people worldwide, and to the expansion of state, legal, and techno-social control over contra-normative modes of gendered and sexual life. In this editor’s introduction, we reflect on the provocation offered in the title of this special issue— Queer Matters in Criminology —and situate this collection’s development within its social, intellectual, and institutional context. We foreground the importance of a queer criminology that challenges criminological spaces to become more explicitly anti-normative and politically radical, and to foster alliances and coalitions in defence of queer and trans lives. At a time when queer and trans research is being vilified, criminalised, surveilled, and censored by state institutions across the globe, spaces where that knowledge can be generated, shared, and defended are as vital as ever.