Women Police in the City of Delhi: Gender Hierarchies, Transgression, and Pariah Femininities.

Abstract

When women personnel are incorporated in the profession of policing, there is a general assumption behind it that the presence of women makes the force sensitive to gender-crimes, and thus more efficient in preventing and handling those. Examining such a general trend and assumption, in this paper, I attempt to see what kind of impacts such inclusion of women into the force has on the structure of gendered hierarchy and patriarchal social norms. Given the fact that policing has traditionally been seen as a 'man's job', how do the women personnel balance between being a police personnel and a woman at the same time? While examining the everyday strategies to manage a balancing act thus needed, I observe that the individual woman personnel has to continuously oscillate between two contrary enactments of what Susan E Martin (1980) calls a policewoman and a policewoman