ABSTRACT
In 1964 the Brazilian military successfully overthrew elected President João Goulart, ushering in 21 years of military rule. This chapter focuses on male police who had been in Brazil's social control system during the military period (1964-1985), to learn how they talk about themselves and the violence they committed. It proposes that if masculinity varies in form and content, then masculinities—even those specifically aggressive, competitive, controlling, and dominating—express themselves differently in relation to violence. The chapter also proposes that masculinities can change in relation to shifts in the structure of states, with such changes in masculinity reflected in discourse about violence. These propositions are explored in an initial study of seven Brazilian police torturers and murderers in their differing relationships to masculinity and violence. Beginning with how structural conditions influence masculinity, Liddle (1996) argues that state making in England was associated with changing masculinities and gender relations as the state shifted from medieval to bourgeois.
