Abstract
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
Keywords
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