ABSTRACT
Traditional discourse has cited that poverty, race, geography, race bias, and police tactics are central factors affecting policing while excluding gender. This elides the crucial importance the variable gender plays in the analysis of policing and police brutality. Gender-normative behaviors and stereotypes are topics imperative in exploring the ways gender influences policing policy, strategies, and tactics. Historically, the behaviors of Black women have been punished and criminalized more than any other racial group for exhibiting non-gender-normative patterns. Few studies have examined how gender mainstreaming transcends into the policing of non-conforming gender behaviors of Black women and women of color demonstrated by the growing trend of the use of excessive force against women of color. This chapter explores gender criminalization and racialized gender police bias from a historical materialist and womanist perspective.
