A gendered practice of urban cultivation: performing power and well-being in M'Bour, Senegal

Abstract

This article outlines how a theoretical approach that explores gender as ‘emplaced performance’ can improve the analytical value of gender by drawing attention to (1) the ways in which gender, as a socially and spatially contingent performance, is enrolled in the relationships that create the city, and (2) how the city, as a constantly evolving and dynamic field of interaction for economic, social, and political processes, (re)configures gender. Drawing on qualitative research carried out in M'Bour, Senegal, and through a case study of a form of urban cultivation called micro-gardening, this analysis explores gender as a socially and spatially contingent performance that produces, and is produced by, the city. The analysis brings together performativity studies with scholarship on place to fashion the analytical approach, and specifically draws attention to emplaced performances of well-being and power. Such an approach, because it draws attention to the contingent dimensions of gender, as well as the effects of gender on material worlds, has an improved analytical potential to inform locally relevant development interventions that recognize and consider the multiple ways in which men and women experience and create the city.