Intersectional Passing and the Costs of Conditional Inclusion: The Embodied Survival of South African Indian Women Leaders

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.