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Theoretical Criminology
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Crime, Edgework and Corporeal Transaction

Stephen Lyng

Carthage College, Wisconsin, USA

This article responds to the call by cultural criminologists for a ‘criminology of the skin’ that attends to the embodied pleasures and emotions generated by certain forms of criminal behavior. Drawing on the ‘edgework’ model of voluntary risk taking and a modified version of Jurgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action, I theorize risk taking in criminal endeavors as an activity linked to the embodied social practices of the life-world. Conceptualized in this way, illicit risk taking can be seen to play an important role in crystallizing the ‘criminal erotics’ involved in some types of crime. Standing in opposition to the disembodied system imperatives of late capitalism, criminal edgework represents a form of escape and resistance to the prevailing structures of political and economic power.

Key Words: corporeal transaction • cultural criminology • edgework • embodied practices • subcultures • system/life-world

Theoretical Criminology, Vol. 8, No. 3, 359-375 (2004)
DOI: 10.1177/1362480604044614
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