Exhausting edges: embodying frontiers of female entrepreneurship at a Burkina Faso market

Female entrepreneurship has long been socially and economically important in West Africa. However, the trope of the female entrepreneur as a poster child for neoliberal development has calcified and compounded women’s responsibility over recent decades, framed as ‘shock absorbers’ and engines of economic growth that can lift families and communities out of structural poverty and insecurity.Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork at a Burkina Faso market, this paper explores the stakes of embodying the moral-economic category of the female entrepreneur, both personally, and for the reproduction of economies through crisis. Focusing on two female traders as they navigate and experience the frontier of threat and accumulation through a protracted security and economic crisis, the paper traces how they continually reconfigure their dynamic and fragile webs of resources to meet evolving risks and responsibilities. Building on the work of feminist scholars who foreground the vigilance and exhaustion of embodying ‘adjustment by necessity’ in over-exploited contexts, I argue that safeguarding best possible futures requires deftly attuning and responding to how structural conditions reshape possibilities for their businesses and families, recognizing the limits of embodied capacity, including their access to other women and girls’ labor, and the edges of their own exhaustion.