ABSTRACT
Studies discussing the gender dimensions of the daily operation of police forces have been growing steadily in number over the past decades (Mourão 2015). One way to classify the approaches of these studies is to note that they diff erentiate between biological dimensions (sex) and their social signifi cations (gender), dimensions that show variation from one society to another. From the advent of theories of modernity, the main category taken for analysis has been how biological sex plays a prominent role in social life and privileges males as agents of transformation. In contrast, women were assigned a secondary role, confi ned to the domestic environment and to caring for the home and the children-who in turn would be educated by her in accordance with their gender. From sex, two clearly distinct genders (here “role-assigning cultural categories”) would be defi ned: masculine and feminine. Any disconnection between sex and gender was treated as dysfunctionality, either social or medical (Giddens 2001).
