Female Prison Guards in Male Prisons: Between Indifferentiation of the Sexes and Reiterations of Gendered Stereotypes
Type de matériel :
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The relatively recent presence of female prison guards in male prisons is still meeting both individual and collective resistance. In the light of works on gender, this article sets out to clarify some of the fears expressed by prison guards, in particular those who relate to a possible dissolution of the difference between the sexes. The study of the evolution of a concrete and emblematic element, the uniform, allows us to observe that, at the current time, diversity in male prisons operates to reinforce the professional virile references and values at the cost of the elimination of the feminine. This choice that promotes the masculine norm in a traditionally monosexual and androcentric milieu must be resituated in an age that is calling the unequivocal bipartition of the sexes into question and introducing elements of porosity into personal, professional, institutional, and social identities. In reaction to this flexibility of identification markers, we see an increase in recourse to gender stereotypes that, by their binary logic, testify to the necessary maintenance of divides in prisons to avoid all risk of becoming close to the detainees. The calling into question of up to now watertight barriers between masculine/feminine is accompanied thus by the fear of seeing the dissolution of all difference between interior/exterior, good/bad, guard/detainee.
Réseaux sociaux