Between Steel and Skin: Corporeal Colonization of Women Workers and Gendered Organizations in Heavy Industry

Abstract

“I felt as if my body was being occupied by the factory.” The words of one woman working in Turkey's heavy industry were repeated in many accounts, capturing how industrial infrastructures calibrated to male norms press directly into women's bodies. Drawing on interpretative phenomenological analysis of 16 in-depth interviews, this study examines how women navigate embodied participation in a male-dominated industrial field. We conceptualize these experiences as corporeal colonization, a patterned and cumulative process through which organizational arrangements settle into bodily capacity over time. The analysis identifies three mechanisms: architectural misfit, bodily violation, and medical and reproductive oversight. These mechanisms render visibility a source of vulnerability and normalize endurance as a condition of belonging. Although participants described small, situated practices of bodily adjustment, these remained confined to individualized coping rather than collective resistance. The study shows how industrial infrastructures actively produce embodied inequality and how organizational power becomes materially inscribed in bodies through everyday work practices.