Wearing the pants

The gendered politics of trashwork in Senegal's capital city

Abstract

This paper draws on ethnographic research to trace the gendered politics of formal trashlabor in Dakar during Senegal's neoliberal period. Beginning with the founding of the trash sector in the Set/Setal social movement (1989), and tracing its social history through today's trashworkers' union battle, it explores the way that women's roles-and rewards-for trashwork are produced and negotiated differently in specific contexts through the mobilization of women's "traditional" domestic duties. This discussion illuminates how urban restructuring and participatory development play on and reconstitute gendered spaces and divisions of labor and connects the feminization of trashlabor to the urban labor question and youth politics. By bringing the household and political economy into conversation, it thus shows how gender is a key line of negotiation in the politics of development and highlights the ambiguous openings provided by the neoliberal era and the deepening of democracy that has accompanied it in Senegal.