Inescapable scripts

Role-Playing Feminist (Re)visions and Rehearsing Racialized State Violence in Police Training Scenarios

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4775461
AutoresChristina Aushana (0000-0002-8592-8355, Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego, USA, autor de correspondencia)
Año2020
Volumen30
Número3
Páginas284-306
Fecha de publicación2020-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaWomen & Performance a journal of feminist theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0740-770X • E-ISSN: 1748-5819
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0740770x.2020.1907685
OpenAlexW3165091292
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas67

This article examines how police vision is trained, tested, and scripted at the site of a local police academy in San Diego, California. I use the term scripting to illustrate how police recruits are directed to see, act, and respond to racialized, gendered others in scenario-based simulations during the final week of the police academy. Through participant-observation and methods in performance ethnography, I argue that turning to police training as an object of analysis offers ethnographic insights into the performance of tacit, ordinary methods of police violence. As a feminist intervention into the “scripting” of police vision, I describe my attempts to read against the grain of these scenario scripts by volunteering as a role-play actor in the police academy, taking on different embodied roles in order to examine how police recruits read the choreography of my racialized body. I suggest an investigation into the performativity of policing can move debates centered on racialized police violence beyond ideological frameworks that rely on the same visualizing technologies and logics of objectivity deployed by the institution of policing

Art · Rehearsing · Scripting language · Sociology · Vision · Visual arts · Computer Science · Gender, Security, and Conflict · Law in Society and Culture · Policing Practices and Perceptions · Psychology