How (In)Visibility Shapes Women's Experience of Inequity in Prison Work: A Cooperative Inquiry With Women Working in Australian Men's Prisons
通过对16名在澳大利亚男子监狱工作的女性进行合作探究，分析了性别规范如何通过性化、消失和揭示三种机制，使女性在男性主导的监狱文化中面临边缘化，并探讨了集体抵抗策略。
ABSTRACT Research shows that women working in men's prisons face both scrutiny and exclusion within a high‐risk, masculinized occupational culture. Addressing a gap in theorizing the processes involved, this article explores the interplay of gender, visibility, and power through a poststructuralist‐informed thematic analysis of data from 16 women participating in four cooperative inquiry groups in Australian men's prisons. Theorized through Lewis and Simpson's (in)visibility vortex, we demonstrate how gendered norms function to marginalize women. First, sexualization produces “abject exposure,” making women visible against the male norm, undermining their workplace legitimacy. Second, “disappearance” renders women invisible to the norm by positioning them as incapable and forms self‐disappearance to protect oneself from exposure. Third, “revelation” occurs when women make gendered norms visible, which participants did through their existence as professionally competent prison workers and, at times, explicit challenges. Our analysis demonstrates the importance of (in)visibility in maintaining gender inequities in male‐dominated organizational cultures, such as prison work, and offers a complex theorization of how sexualization, risk and fear, and professional competence operate within the (in)visibility vortex. We also evidence how cooperative inquiry can develop collective strategies for resistance, offering insights for transforming the gendered conditions of such environments.