Police Masculinities

This chapter focuses on the dynamics of male violence within the police. Arguing that the pacification should be understood as a project that sought to direct and control male aggression, it examines the fraught nature of attempts to modernize patriarchal subjectivities within the police. It explores how traditional forms of manhood are structured around men’s role as protectors and providers of their families as well as the effects of the demands placed on men to hide their vulnerabilities on professional as well as conjugal relations. Finally, the chapter analyzes how militarized and religious understandings of manhood have travelled across borders in the Americas and argues that militant masculinity is at the center of far-right attempts to transform Brazil into a religious police state.