ABSTRACT
Like Chapter 5, this chapter delves deeper into the culture in which the individual experiences of LGB officers from Chapters 3 and 4 take place. But while Chapter 5 focuses on the image of the police, this chapter focuses on the work of policing and its relation to sexuality. The data used are interviews with LGB officers and also observations of police work and interviews with additional police officers (whose sexual orientation is unknown to the author). The chapter shows how police work is corporeal and intimate, which accentuates sexuality, and how the way officers speak to each other is characterized by a raw but cordial jargon, which can be a source of both inclusion and exclusion. In addition, it is shown that there is a tendency toward de-heteromasculinization in the Swedish police, which adds nuance to the image of the police as macho. Overall, the analysis in the chapter suggests that the macho norm combined with the corporeal and intimate work accentuates the relevance of sexuality in the sense that, under such conditions, there is more at risk if one breaks with the hetero norm, which elucidates why gay men often are thought to have more difficulty being included, as they “fit less well” into the macho norm.
