After sixteen intensive months, I quit my employed position as a security guard at a local hospital. By drawing on my autoethnographic experiences in the form of “ethnographic fiction writing”, as well as eight interviews with my former male colleagues, I explore how the guards’ constructions of masculinity intersect with their security assessment and subsequent application of force, chemical incarceration, and other coercive security tactics on involuntarily-committed mental health patients. The narratives are framed by the available literature on gender and masculinity within the security, police, prison and military institutions, as well as the theoretical notions of gendered institutions (Acker), hegemonic masculinity (Connell & Messerschmidt), doing gender (West & Zimmerman), and Dave Holmes’s application of Foucauldian biopolitical power to forensic healthcare settings. These concepts are used in tandem with a creative methodological tool to reveal the “messy”, “bloody” and “gendered” ways in which hospital life unfolds between the guard, the nurse, and the patient prisoner. By escaping more traditional forms of academic writing, I am able to weave raw, sensitive and reflexive thoughts and emotions into the research design and analysis. The analysis is divided into two narratives: “Us” and “Them”. “Us” emphasizes the gendered ways in which the hospital guard learns, reproduces, resists, lives up, or fails to live up to the masculine codes of the profession. Here, the guard must confront cultural demands to demonstrate physical prowess, authority and heroism during a patient battle. “Them” explores how hegemonic masculinity shapes the hierarchical and coercive relations between the guard, the nurse, and the patient, and reinforces psychiatrized discourses that promote punishment, pain, bureaucracy and control. Overall, these findings call for the abolition of physical restraint, chemical incarceration and other coercive security measures within our healthcare institutions, and encourage future research to give voice to the lived experiences of women guards and security management teams.

After sixteen intensive months, I quit my employed position as a security guard at a local hospital. By drawing on my autoethnographic experiences in the form of “ethnographic fiction writing”, as well as eight interviews with my former male colleagues, I explore how the guards’ constructions of masculinity intersect with their security assessment and subsequent application of force, chemical incarceration, and other coercive security tactics on involuntarily-committed mental health patients. The narratives are framed by the available literature on gender and masculinity within the security, police, prison and military institutions, as well as the theoretical notions of gendered institutions (Acker), hegemonic masculinity (Connell & Messerschmidt), doing gender (West & Zimmerman), and Dave Holmes’s application of Foucauldian biopolitical power to forensic healthcare settings. These concepts are used in tandem with a creative methodological tool to reveal the “messy”, “bloody” and “gendered” ways in which hospital life unfolds between the guard, the nurse, and the patient prisoner. By escaping more traditional forms of academic writing, I am able to weave raw, sensitive and reflexive thoughts and emotions into the research design and analysis. The analysis is divided into two narratives: “Us” and “Them”. “Us” emphasizes the gendered ways in which the hospital guard learns, reproduces, resists, lives up, or fails to live up to the masculine codes of the profession. Here, the guard must confront cultural demands to demonstrate physical prowess, authority and heroism during a patient battle. “Them” explores how hegemonic masculinity shapes the hierarchical and coercive relations between the guard, the nurse, and the patient, and reinforces psychiatrized discourses that promote punishment, pain, bureaucracy and control. Overall, these findings call for the abolition of physical restraint, chemical incarceration and other coercive security measures within our healthcare institutions, and encourage future research to give voice to the lived experiences of women guards and security management teams.

After sixteen intensive months, I quit my employed position as a security guard at a local hospital. By drawing on my autoethnographic experiences in the form of “ethnographic fiction writing”, as well as eight interviews with my former male colleagues, I explore how the guards’ constructions of masculinity intersect with their security assessment and subsequent application of force, chemical incarceration, and other coercive security tactics on involuntarily-committed mental health patients. The narratives are framed by the available literature on gender and masculinity within the security, police, prison and military institutions, as well as the theoretical notions of gendered institutions (Acker), hegemonic masculinity (Connell & Messerschmidt), doing gender (West & Zimmerman), and Dave Holmes’s application of Foucauldian biopolitical power to forensic healthcare settings. These concepts are used in tandem with a creative methodological tool to reveal the “messy”, “bloody” and “gendered” ways in which hospital life unfolds between the guard, the nurse, and the patient prisoner. By escaping more traditional forms of academic writing, I am able to weave raw, sensitive and reflexive thoughts and emotions into the research design and analysis. The analysis is divided into two narratives: “Us” and “Them”. “Us” emphasizes the gendered ways in which the hospital guard learns, reproduces, resists, lives up, or fails to live up to the masculine codes of the profession. Here, the guard must confront cultural demands to demonstrate physical prowess, authority and heroism during a patient battle. “Them” explores how hegemonic masculinity shapes the hierarchical and coercive relations between the guard, the nurse, and the patient, and reinforces psychiatrized discourses that promote punishment, pain, bureaucracy and control. Overall, these findings call for the abolition of physical restraint, chemical incarceration and other coercive security measures within our healthcare institutions, and encourage future research to give voice to the lived experiences of women guards and security management teams.

This thesis makes use of biopolitical theory to examine the governmental and organizational response to the covid-19-infodemic. It aims to answer the puzzling research question as to why the infodemic – whose inherent problem is an overabundance of information – is responded to and met with even greater amounts of information by governments and health organizations, and what implications these measures may have on the population. The analysis finds that the question can partly be answered by derivation to previous research within the field of crisis communication: the most efficient way to respond to mis- and disinformation is to respond with correct information and with counter arguments. To answer the question in full an analysis of the subject of security is conducted where what can be interpreted from the material, following a modified version of Carol Lee Bacchi’s “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” method, is that the human judgement can be understood as the subject of security. The idea is that by securing the human judgment through improving people’s health literacy, people can be taught to act in a manner which is coherent with the state’s biopolitical goals, i.e. to secure the survival of the population. The analysis also shows that while these measures are made in an effort to secure the population, the measures themselves risk becoming a threat to the very population it is supposed to protect.