An emerging literature has been building bridges between poststructuralism and participatory action research, highlighting the latter's potential for transformative action. Using examples from participative action research projects with incarcerated or previously incarcerated women, this article discusses how participatory action research is a methodology that can be enabling and restraining, with the effect of destabilising or maintaining or existing relations of power. Theorizing embodied subjectivity as a vehicle and an effect of power, this article explores how participation and action can have normalizing and disciplinary effects, as well as be sites in which participants can interrogate and frame subjectivities in new and alternative ways.