Description
This paper examines the gendered visual representation of Rio de Janeiro’s state military police operations in the city’s favelas. Drawing on mediatization of war literature (Hoskins & O’Loughlin, 2010; Kaempf, 2013; Maltby, 2012), which explores how war representations normalize conflict, and feminist security and IR studies (Enloe, 2000, 2007; Hooper, 2001; Runyan, 2007; Young, 2003), which investigate militarization and its effects, it argues that the police’s social media imagery of its personnel, weaponry, and policing actions relies on entrenched gender constructs. These serve to legitimize military-style force and dismiss both criticism and non-violent alternatives to the often-lethal policing in Rio’s favelas.
The analysis focuses on images posted by the official Facebook pages of the State of Rio Military Police and the Police Pacifying Unit. Due to the large volume of content and limited scope, the paper adopts an illustrative rather than exhaustive approach. Its main goal is to highlight the value of a gendered perspective when analyzing the mediatization of war and militarized policing, suggesting that even a selective analysis can be insightful. As the analysis of photos produced by Rio’s military police will show, the masculinised visual representations of military police officers as protectors of the (less masculinised) citizen (Young 2003) against the perceived enemies situated within the favelas continue to reinforce gender hierarchies and perpetuate lethal violence within Rio de Janeiro against internal threats, despite the police’s efforts to portray themselves as professional and disciplined crime fighters.
