How (In)Visibility Shapes Women's Experience of Inequity in Prison Work: A Cooperative Inquiry With Women Working in Australian Men's Prisons

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.