ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on participant observation in a law enforcement academy to demonstrate how a hidden curriculum encourages aspects of hegemonic masculinity among recruits. Academy training teaches female and male recruits that masculinity is an essential requirement for the practice of policing and that women do not belong. Masculinity is a social construction reproduced through everyday interactions. Its quality as a social construction rather than as a property of individual men can be seen in this definition by Kerfoot and Knights: 'the socially generated consensus of what it means to be a man, to be "manly" or to display such behaviour at any one time'. While there may be no law against women entering the police academy, the hidden curriculum there taught recruits that dominant masculinity is necessary to performing their duties as cops. Women's presence at the academy facilitated these lessons by indicating the boundaries surrounding masculinity and by highlighting masculinity's superiority over things not-masculine.
