ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the production of a dynamic police image within and through queer spaces and practices of history-telling. It examines how police can physically and discursively occupy queer space to elevate a ‘proud’ institutional identity and maintain power. Conventional representations of Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon’s participation in Melbourne’s Pride March in 2002—an Australian ‘first’—show how histories of police violence can be used strategically to construct a modernised police force in the present. Paying attention to the ways in which individual and institutional feelings are represented and circulated in popular accounts of this event, the chapter shows how police leaders can be constructed as agents of progressive social change, despite the continuities in the coercive policing of queer spaces. Official police participation in gay pride parades not only buttresses their reputation against the negative implications of incidents of brutality and practices of over-policing, but also contributes to the normalisation of policing at LGBT events.
