“Mulheres de guerra e de paz”: a constituição subjetiva das mulheres policiais do Estado de Minas Gerais através da análise de seus discursos à luz de teorias de poder e gênero

Abstract

Female participation in Brazilian military organizations is relatively recent and has given rise to studies relevant to the understanding of social gender relations in environments recognized as culturally and historically male, and the female presence has not yet been pacified, like the Minas Gerais Military Police, almost after four decades of joining the Corporation. It is precisely the subjective understanding of this work and social reality that, as the discourses of the military police present, raised this thesis study. Centered on reflecting on how the speeches of the military police present the subjective and symbolic aspects of their social representation in an eminently male space, this thesis analyzes the female social representations according to the objective and subjective aspects present in their discourses. This study seeks, therefore, to reflect on the basis of conducting in-depth interviews with female military police officers from different hierarchical circles, as well as through qualitative research and discourse analysis, about the meanings of female police work in the mining corporation, the oldest organization military force of Brazilian police nature. Almost four decades after the entry of women in the Minas Gerais Military Police, the study reveals that despite the advances observed in the female trajectory, such as the female presence in all hierarchical levels of the Corporation, including the promotion of women to the last post of the career, informal paradigms, especially of a cultural nature, represent barriers that women need to face daily. In this sense, it is possible to observe the existence of sexual and informal segregation present in the institution, where the female staff represents about 10% of the total staff, and even though they are allocated to the end policing activity, they act under suspicion and male discredit about his competence. Such a practice, justified under the protectionist argument of a macho police culture, and which would therefore have a duty to protect the women who make up its ranks, has as a reflection of this practice the subjugation of its professional competence and its merit as a minority that make up the ranks of a police military organization. This effort would thus have the objective of caring for the image of power, which, being masculine, cannot be tainted by the female presence in the ostensive work, which would represent a weakening of the police authority, compromising its history and its reputation for physical strength and immediate disposition to confront violence. If, on the one hand, the female presence in the Minas Gerais Military Police is often used to signal a measure between democracy and modernity that call for female occupation in the most diverse spaces, on the other hand, the use of their capacity and the perception of their work aspirations tend to be made invisible, as if women did not live up to that social space. In this way, this work reflects not only on the social self-representations of gender in the Military Police, but also on its possible implications for the subjective and symbolic experience of women in the police, as well as for the senses and expectations related to the role of women in the Public Security area nowaday.