Intersectional Passing and the Costs of Conditional Inclusion: The Embodied Survival of South African Indian Women Leaders
研究南非印度裔女性领导者如何在倡导包容却维持排斥规范的机构中，通过情感克制、策略性自我呈现和认知保留等伪装劳动来维持存在，揭示了包容的条件性和提取性本质。
ABSTRACT Although inclusion is increasingly celebrated as institutional progress, individuals marked by intersecting racialized and gendered histories often experience it as conditional and extractive. This study examines how South African Indian women (SAIW) leaders navigate the affective and epistemic labor required to remain legible within institutions that promote inclusion while sustaining exclusionary norms. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with SAIW women leaders across diverse sectors, we conceptualize intersectional passing as the embodied, emotional, and cognitive labor required to sustain presence without guaranteed recognition. These practices include emotional restraint, strategic self‐presentation, and epistemic withholding, which enable continued participation in institutions structured by whiteness, patriarchy, and postcolonial residue. We advance current debates in gender and work by theorizing agency not through overt resistance but as relational, iterative, and shaped by constraint. Our findings highlight how institutional inclusion often depends less on who is present and more on who can conform to dominant expectations of affective and epistemic propriety. We conclude by arguing that institutional change requires diversifying representation alongside transforming the emotional and epistemic norms that regulate belonging. We contribute to feminist and postcolonial understandings of workplace inequality and the everyday politics of recognition.