Police Academies Essay

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1. Describe the link between hierarchy and gender that police recruits learn to make in police academies in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Gender is a social construct which is defined through learned femaleness and maleness of an individual. It is usually connected to the division of labor, role, expectations, and sexual orientation. Gender differs from sex in a way that gender is nurtured while sex is a biological term. It is often perceived through the binary system – system which is based on the polarisation of two opposite terms with the same basis, and in this case man and woman. The binary system often defines heterosexuality as a primary and default sexual orientation. Hierarchy is a system of organization in which people are divided into levels of importance and authority. The primary focus of the text is how police officers, which train their recruits in police academies in Buenos Aires, use…show more content…
A degrading civilian who wants to become a police officer is normalized and seen as a way of reaching the state of perfect maleness. ((The author is highly objective when it comes to this ethnography even though ethnocentrism is mostly present when an anthropologist writes about a certain kind of violence.)) Besides mentioned perspectives, the author uses synchronic perspective and does not present the history of the police academy or the community in order for us to understand the root of police officers' beliefs regarding their images of civilians and practices of violence and authority. Recruits and police officers are polarized, making a dichotomous group of people which differs according to their status. Recruits are dominated by their authority which sharply divides the civilian world and the police. One must forget about his civilian past in order to become a fully functioning police

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