Punishment at the Margins: Gender, Sexuality, and Legal Failure in the Execution of Wanda Jean Allen

In American history of criminal justice, gender has always been racialized and race has been gendered. The traditional criminological studies have always focused on men ignoring the concept of gender-fluidity in whole. In fact, there was no evidence of female representation until the 1960’s within the American Society of Criminology. Under such social construction, at a time when feminist criminology was itself struggling to receive recognition, the emergence of queer criminology was nearly impossible for establishment. Hence, lack of research, policies, and legal constructions, also systematic ignorance have led to many queer criminal cases which were never truly resolved ensuring the legitimate essence of justice. One such case is the infamous case of Wanda Jean Allen. This article highlights the sociological-legal inadequacies from a criminological perspective and continues to argue that the case of Wanda Jean Allen was not just failure in due process but convincing proof of Frances Heidensohn’s theory of ‘double deviants’ in American society. The case study of Allen is significant as it throws light on the conservative, under-developed South-Asian nations which are yet to modify an inclusive law system for the people resisting to confess their gender in a binary way. This paper also emphasizes that the paradigmatic pattern of exclusion is replicable in many countries with South-Asian societies.