Historically, policing in Rio de Janeiro has been shaped by the equation of racialized violence and masculinity. Attempts to reform the police have paradoxically drawn on forms of male violence that are centered on the rational and professional use of force and on “softer” practices, such as dialogue and collaboration, symbolically coded as feminine. The failure of police reform reflects the cultural salience of understandings of masculinity centered around violence within the police, historical patterns of policing in Rio, and political actors’ strategic cultivation of male violence. Through Rio de Janeiro's failed attempt at police reform, we theorize the relation between racialized state violence, authoritarian political projects, and transgressive forms of male violence, arguing that an important appeal of authoritarianism lies in its promise to carve out a space for performing what we call wild masculinity. [masculinity, race, police, violence, gender, politics, favela, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil]

The Pacifying Police Units, rolled out in Rio de Janeiro ahead of the 2016 Summer Olympics, were part of a police intervention conceived to end the logic of war that characterized the city’s public security policies. As such, it adopted “so” strategies of policing aimed at reducing violence and asserting state sovereignty in “pacified” favelas. Drawing on a postcolonial framework of analysis, we argue that these favelas can be understood as sites for experiments in imperial statecraft, where a new set of socio-moral relations that we call police moralism were inscribed onto spaces and bodies. Pacification, in this context, means the reassertion of Brazil’s historical racial order. In our conclusion, we read the moral order implemented in the favelas as a prefiguration of President Jair Bolsonaro’s right-wing authoritarianism on a national scale.

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