Search for: All records

In this article, we build on the vital insights of feminist thought in economic geography, extending this body of work via a global Black feminist geographic lens. To do so, we center two moments of the Ugandan bridal industry: the international trade of imported dresses and their design and refashioning there. Via the journeys of these dresses, we make visible how connected racial-gendered and classed power relations structure, drive, and manifest global trade networks. We provide geographically contextualized accounts of the gendered-racialization of economies, while always tracing the ties between varied forms of that racialization across place and through history. And we demonstrate the agency and crucial economic worldmaking of African women who labor within and fashion economic geographies. More broadly, we use dress, and the act of dressing up, in two ways. First, via a global Black feminist lens, we show how dress can be a deeply instructive material object that tells us much about the geographies of economies. Second, we use dress as a metaphor for urgent and playful connection, helping us to refashion the subfield of economic geography as feminist, antiracist, and critically transformative. 

In this paper we develop a feminist political ecology of disaster colonialism. To do so, we focus on a series of fires that devastated Park Yard Market in Kampala, Uganda, one of the largest retail spaces in East Africa. Officially accidental, rumours suggest the fires were deliberately set to displace traders and make way for the lucrative (re)development of the city‐centre land. Concerned less with the veracity of these rumours and more with their political ecologies, we show how narratives of Park Yard forwarded by the state and private interests indeed readied it for disaster. Here, we trace how colonial narratives of urban planning in the city, driven by technocratic imperatives of improvement, modernisation, and safety echo in the contemporary devaluation of Park Yard and its women traders. Against this, we show how the caring labour and investment by those traders was central to the formation and maintenance of the market. Over time they created an economically viable space, even as their work was devalued and legally unrecognised. Our analysis interrogates the colonial past‐presents and the gendered‐racialised logics of neoliberal urban development. This framing understands spectacular disaster, a series of highly destructive fires, as inextricably connected to historically produced systems of precarious urban marginality. It demonstrates the uneven impacts, and in particular the deeply deleterious impacts for low‐income Ugandan women; the relationship between fire disaster, vulnerability, and the labour of social reproduction; and the varied ways female traders resisted, adapted, and struggled to defend their economic space in the city. Specifically, a feminist political ecology also helps us understand the embodied nature of this relationship. That is, it is always produced through emotion‐laden, material, and corporeal gendered, racialised and classed power and both relies on and violates particular kinds of idealised or disposable urban subjectivities.