The masks of the State

women and researchers in the Military Police

Abstract

This article is about the results of a research conducted between 2015 and 2016 in a police battalion of a municipality in the state of São Paulo focusing on the case of policewomen and our own difficulties to access the field. The text is divided in two parts. In the first part, we propose a critical revision of the Brazilian literature underlying the general absence of an indepth discussion about the research conditions. In the second part, we try to show how our theoretical analysis – such as the analysis of the masks of the State, the potential disruptor of gender inside the police, and the persuasive masculinity – were illuminated by the methodological limits we faced while trying to develop an ethnographic approached. The State appears as a fundamental piece in this text. The state does not merely hides itself and becomes opaque but also generates, through the employees in interaction with us as social sciences’ researchers, several layers of masks that allows it to suggest itself while refusing to be guessed and known, thus limiting the flow of communication that is the basis of social research. We conclude by the necessity of involving the academy in this problem of state’s un clogging finally criticizing a normative “ethics” that may only serve to enhance and make the old opacities of the state and military police more creative.