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En-gendering the Police: Women's Police Stations and Feminism in São Paulo

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Cecília MacDowell Santos
Cecília MacDowell Santos*
Affiliation:
University of San Francisco
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Abstract

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This article contributes to feminist state theory and studies of women's police stations in Latin America by examining the processes shaping the multiple and changing positions of explicit alliance, opposition, and ambiguous alliance assumed by policewomen regarding feminists since the creation of the world's first women's police station in 1985 in São Paulo. While studies of women's police stations tend to overlook the political conjuncture, much of the literature on the state and gender explains the relationship between the state and women's movements as a function of the political regime. I argue for a more grounded feminist state theory, taking into account interactive macro and micro, local and international forces. As this case study demonstrates, policewoman-feminist relations evolve due to interactions between the political conjuncture, the hegemonic masculinist police culture, developments in the feminist discourse on violence against women, and the impact of the contact policewomen sustain with women clients.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , 2004 , pp. 29 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

∗

This article is the result of extensive revisions on papers I have presented at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at the meetings of the Latin American Studies Association and the American Sociological Association. I thank David López and his graduate students, as well as Millie Thayer, for comments on a first and rough version of this article. I am also grateful to the anonymous LARR reviewers, Susie Dod Thomas, Aránzazu Borrachero, Laura Lyster, and especially Stephanie Sears for comments on earlier drafts of this article. Thanks also to Adriana Carvalho for her invaluable research assistance, Teresa Walsh for English revisions, the University of San Francisco for funding additional research, and the policewomen and feminist activists who generously gave me interviews.

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