“Women of power”: the policewomen in a state of men

Abstract

This thesis scrutinizes how state power and femininity are articulated in the police force where state power is mostly deployed by men. The police organization is taken as a micro setting where state power is gendered through daily and mundane practices of specific actors. Accordingly, this inquiry focuses on the policewomen and examines how their gendered subjectivities are constructed and negotiated in this particular context. It is argued that the policewomen “do gender” via their daily performances of masculinity and femininity. That is, these women enact and shift between different performances of masculinity and femininity in order to survive within this masculinist geography. Furthermore, it is claimed that the policewomen are assimilated into the police force as they embrace and normalize its masculinist norms and practices. Nevertheless, this study also emphasizes that the experiences of the policewomen cannot be adequately grasped merely as an instance of assimilation and subordination. Despite their secondary position in policing, they are able to come up with certain possibilities of empowerment. Thus, this thesis identifies them as “women of power” where power connotes masculinist state power. At this point, it is suggested that their experience of empowerment can be captured along two central axes. Firstly, they are empowered as individual women against men. They deploy institutionalized masculinist power of policing in order to defy individual men’s power. Secondly, the policewomen are empowered vis-à-vis the society as privileged state agents. In this regard, it is asserted that they identify themselves as the personification of the state and they open up a space of action and intervention via this self-representation.