Abstract

Drawing from interviews, fieldnotes, and visual data, we examine representations of policewomen and gender communicated in Canadian police museums. We examine four trends from our dataset. First, we found silences regarding the history of women in policing in Canada. Second, there was a fetish-like emphasis on women’s police uniforms. Third, when included policewomen were treated in a tokenistic manner. By contrast, displays focusing on men treated them as policing heroes. We argue the history of policing may be one of white male domination, but this facet of social control should not be further normalized by erasing important elements of the histories of women from police museums. In the discussion, we explain what this analysis adds to literatures on representations of women in museums and on representations of policing.

摘要

我们利用采访、实地记录和视觉数据，研究了在加拿大警察博物馆中交流的女警和性别的表现。我们从我们的数据集中检查了四种趋势。首先，我们发现对加拿大女性警务历史的沉默。其次，对女警制服有一种类似恋物癖的强调。第三，当被包括在内时，女警察受到象征性的对待。相比之下，专注于男性的展示将他们视为警察英雄。我们认为警察的历史可能是白人男性统治的历史之一，但不应通过从警察博物馆中删除女性历史的重要元素来进一步规范社会控制的这一方面。在讨论中，我们解释了这种分析对博物馆中女性形象和警务形象的文献有何补充。