Romantic (In)Justice: Criminal-Legal System-Impacted Black Women’s Romantic Relationship Status and Quality

• Author: Allison E. Monterrosa
• DOI: 10.1177/15570851211019472
• Published date: 01 October 2021
• Date: 01 October 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

2021, Vol. 16(4) 424 –446

https://doi.org/10.1177/15570851211019472

Feminist Criminology

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/15570851211019472

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Article

Romantic (In)Justice:

Criminal-Legal System-

Impacted Black Women’s

Romantic Relationship Status

and Quality

Allison E. Monterrosa1

Abstract

This study of working class, heterosexual, criminal-legal system-impacted Black women

described the women’s romantic histories and current romantic relationship statuses

in terms of commitment, exclusivity, and perceived quality. Using intersectional

research methods, qualitative interviews were conducted with 31 Black women

between the ages of 18 and 65 years who were working class, resided in Southern

California, and were impacted by the criminal-legal system. Data were analyzed using

an intersectional Black feminist criminological framework and findings revealed six

types of relationship statuses. These relationship statuses did not live up to the

women’s aspirations and yielded disparate levels of emotional and psychological

strain across relationship statuses.

Keywords

women and social policy, justice goals, intersections of race/class/gender, intimate

partner violence, romantic precarity

Intimacy can be achieved through various types of interpersonal relationships, includ-

ing romantic relationships. While romantic intimacy is framed as a personal matter, it

is also a political phenomenon. Indeed, scholars and social justice activists have often

argued that the personal is political (Combahee River Collective, 1974; Crenshaw,

1989; Freire, 1970; Hill Collins, 1989; hooks, 1981; Lorde, 1977; Mills, 1959; Moraga

1University of California, Riverside, USA

Corresponding Author:

Allison E. Monterrosa, Department of Sociology, University of California Riverside, 900 University Way,

Riverside, CA 92521-9800, USA.

Email: amont037@ucr.edu

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& Anzaldúa, 2015; Taylor, 2017). In this article, I center romantic relationships as a

unit of analysis due to the political and social power, as well as the economic implica-

tions, they yield within our society. Romantic partnerships are viewed as sites of power

relations, as they reflect hierarchies within the broader society (Oswin & Olund,

2010). Romantic couplings produce direct rewards, including increased social capital

and wealth-building opportunities (Carby, 1987; Cohen, 2005). Access to or exclusion

from intimacy has a multitude of structural and individual outcomes, including per-

sonal welfare, community attachment, sexual sociality, and health and socioeconomic

impacts (Hutson et al., 2018).

This study adds to intersectional understandings of racialized and gendered inequi-

ties by focusing on intimacy in the form of romantic relationships involving Black

women who are criminal-legal system-impacted. The term “system-impacted” refers

to “those who have been incarcerated, those with arrests/convictions but no incarcera-

tion and those who have been directly impacted by a loved one being incarcerated”

(Underground Scholars Language Guide, 2019, p. 1). The intimate sphere is a site of

“privileged institutions of social reproduction, the accumulation and transfer of capi-

tal, and self-development” (Berlant & Warner, 1998, p. 553). Access to romantic inti-

macy is governed by social forces stratified by race, class, gender, sexuality, and

various social identities which function to perpetuate hierarchies of power, dictating

who has access to participate and which types of benefits might be afforded from par-

ticipation (Hutson et al., 2018; Oswin & Olund, 2010). As such, focusing on romantic

intimacy is a social justice project that seeks to highlight injustice in the intimate

sphere to promote equitable access to romantic relationships and the benefits of inti-

macy that those relationships may provide. By providing data on the ways in which

criminal-legal system-impacted Black women perceive their access to romantic part-

nerships, this study fills the gap in knowledge of romantic relationship inequities as

viewed through lived experiences. Furthermore, the intersectional framework used in

this study allows for an examination of Black women’s relationships to broader power

structures (Crenshaw, 1989; Hull et al., 1982). The concept of intersectionality was

borne out of critical race theory, a legal theory revealing the ways in which racial dis-

crimination is embedded within the law (Bell, 1995; Crenshaw et al., 1995). Crenshaw

expands this analysis to include the multiple marginalized identities of race and gen-

der, with specific reference to Black women and antidiscrimination doctrine (Crenshaw,

1989).

Crenshaw argues, “the civil rights constituency cannot afford to view antidiscrimi-

nation doctrine as a permanent pronouncement of society’s commitment to ending

racial subordination. Rather, antidiscrimination law represents an ongoing ideological

struggle in which the occasional winners harbor the moral, coercive, consensual power

of law. Nonetheless, the victories it offers can be ephemeral and the risks of engage-

ment substantial” (Crenshaw, 1988, p. 1335). The explanatory power of intersectional-

ity centers Black women’s unique positionality of being a part of both a stigmatized

racial and gender group, these categories are not mutually exclusive—they are recon-

stitutive (Crenshaw, 1989). Black women’s experiences are not the sum of race and

gender, but as Black women (Crenshaw, 1989). Applying this theoretical frame to the