Journal Articles

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/7915

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2024 - 20252

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Author: search.filters.author.Riley SSubject: search.filters.subject.women

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    How (In)Visibility Shapes Women's Experience of Inequity in Prison Work: A Cooperative Inquiry With Women Working in Australian Men's Prisons
    (John Wiley and Sons Ltd, 2025-10-11) Walker C; Riley S; Stephens C; Beban A
    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.
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    Empowering middle-aged women? A discourse analysis of gendered ageing in the Chinese television reality show sisters who make waves
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2024-01-23) Zhang X; Riley S
    Sisters Who Make Waves is a popular Chinese reality show that affirmatively centres “middle-aged” women. Given its popularity and positive framing, the show has significant potential to shape Chinese discourses of gendered aging. To examine this potential, we performed a discourse analysis on Season 2 of Sisters Who Make Waves, identifying its discursive constructions of gendered aging; the subject positions within these discourses; and the rhetorical strategies interpellating the viewer to identify with these subject positions. Three discourses were evident: (1) “age is a problem for women” (an account articulated only to be refuted), (2) “age is a problem only if you let it;” and (3) “hyper resilience” (an expectation of psychological resilience in the face of severe challenges). Reading this analysis through the lens of a postfeminist sensibility, we show how the affirmative potential of Sisters Who Make Waves is undercut with the show’s entanglement of empowerment with regulation and synergies between postfeminist feeling rules and Chinese state ideology of Positive Energy 正能量.