Dirty Work at the Intersections of Gender, Class, and Nation: Liberian Market Women in Post-Conflict Times

This study explored how market women rework meanings of dirty work and gender, class, and nation in post-conflict Liberia. I used African feminist theory as a lens, which nuances a simplistic and Western-centered reading of market women's empowerment. In this study, the notion of empowerment is connected to the principle of negotiation or the ability to compromise and strategically capitalize on situations. The women used three main strategies to rework market work: appropriating stigmatizing features, aligning with the oppositional discourse, and creating new meanings. The study contributes to dirty work scholarship by debunking the idea that meanings of dirty work have inherently positive or negative impacts on workers’ agency. Instead, my African feminist lens foregrounds the importance of situation and how workers leverage positive or negative meanings in different contexts. This intersectional framework allows us to reframe dirty work as a culturally situated concept by considering nation alongside gender and class.