'Just play the game’: exploring how masculinities shape emotionality within male dominated organisations

The authors previous work on the military focused on how emotions were constructed and understood within the military environment. It was found that as opposed to masculinities being a barrier to emotionality (Higate, 2005), they rather provided a lens to which all experiences were understood. For example, some emotional expression was deemed ‘appropriately masculine’ (e.g. if someone was hurt whilst on operation) for a limited period of time, whereas other forms of emotional expression was deemed ‘inappropriately feminine’ (e.g. crying because you are missing family). Thus, masculinities and femininities provided a blueprint for the appropriateness of emotionality. Similar to the Military, Fire fighting and policing in the United Kingdom has traditionally been and remains a male dominated organisation (Baigent, 2001; Lewis, 2004), of which is argued to be linked to construction of this traditional masculine culture within these three organisations (Baigent, 2001; Brown, 1998; Dodsworth, 2007; Higate, 2005; Holdway and Parker, 1998; Sutton, 1992; Piqueo and Greene, 2000 ). The current work sets to conduct 40 interviews with both males and female; 20 with the fire Service and 20 with the Police. These interviews aim to explore how the construction of a ‘good’ police officer/fire fighter mediates emotional expression. In addition, interview data on the Military will be reanalysed, using a different methodological viewpoint; Discourse Analysis. It is hoped that this research will provide more understanding of how gendered discourses moderates how we talk about emotion.