In the mid-1980s, Daniels coined the term 'invisible work' to characterize those types of women's unpaid labour-housework and volunteer work-which had been culturally and economically devalued. Scholars have since applied this term to many types of labour, yet there is little clarity or consensus as to what 'invisibility' means and what mechanisms produce it. Through an in-depth analysis of this far-reaching literature, the present article seeks to reconstruct 'invisible work' as a more robust analytical concept. It argues that work is made invisible through three intersecting sociological mechanisms-here identified as cultural, legal and spatial mechanisms of invisibility. Though they differ in function and degree, each of these mechanisms obscures the fact that work is performed and therefore contributes to its economic devaluation. Ultimately, this revised concept of invisible work offers scholars a new analytic tool to untangle the systems that produce and reproduce disadvantage for workers.

A number of journalists and scholars have pointed to the sexual objectification of women and men in popular media to argue that Western culture has become ''sexualized'' or even ''pornified.'' Yet it is not clear whether men or women have become more frequently-or more intensely sexualized-over time. In a longitudinal content analysis of images of women and men on more than four decades of Rolling Stone magazine covers , we begin to answer such questions. Using a unique analytical framework that allows us to measure both the frequency and intensity of sexualization, we find that sexualized images of men and women have increased, though women continue to be more frequently sexualized than men. Yet our most striking finding is the change in how women-but not men-are sexualized. Women are increasingly likely to be ''hypersexualized,'' but men are not. These findings not only document changes in the sexualization of men and women in popular culture over time, they also point to a narrowing of the culturally acceptable ways for ''doing'' femininity as presented in popular media.

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Scholars have persuasively argued that U.S. penal and welfare institutions comprise a single policy regime that has taken a punitive turn with carceral expansion and welfare contraction. Less recognized, however, is the centrality of labor to this regime. Not only has labor been the lynchpin of welfare reform with the expansion of workfare, it has also been an important yet overlooked dimension of mass incarceration, as most able-bodied American prisoners are required to work. For prisoners and welfare recipients, work is a punitive curtailment of citizenship rights, even as it is a foundation of such rights for others. This article thus conceptualizes work as a form of punishment in the penal-welfare regime. Drawing on 83 in-depth interviews with incarcerated and workfare workers, it examines these workers’ penal subjectivities—how they ideologically navigate their labor qua punishment. Through this negotiation, it finds, incarcerated and workfare workers deploy, contest, and reify the cultural narratives that justify their relegation to punitive labor regimes.

Scholars have examined many different types of labour, including 'nonmarket ', 'informal' and 'underground' work. Such studies elucidate the conditions and consequences for workers in these jobs, while also generally accepting as unproblematic the basic distinctions between such categories of labour and 'market' work. Yet such distinctions should be a central point of interrogation. This article probes these distinctions by analysing the overlapping social and legal boundaries which fragment work into categories of 'market', 'nonmarket', 'informal' and 'underground' labour. Instead of reifying these categorizations, however, this analysis shows them to be socially constructed categories that mutually constitute one another. By systematizing their points of connection and departure, the boundary map presented in this article provides the analytical structure for new comparative research across seemingly dissimilar categories of work, which will extend scholarly understanding of the fragmentation of work and the relationship between work and inequality.