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Paper short abstract

Using feminist political ecology, this article reframes Agbogbloshie as a gendered scrap economy where moral economies normalise toxic labour. Masculine endurance and feminised care govern slow violence, enabling digital value chains to externalise environmental and health costs without regulation.

Paper long abstract

Agbogbloshie is widely framed in global policy, media, and NGO discourse as a toxic e-waste ‘dump’, emblematic of environmental crisis, informality, and regulatory failure in the Global South. Drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with scrap workers and vendors, this article reinterprets Agbogbloshie as a gendered and embodied labour ecology organised through long-standing scrap economies and embedded within global digital value chains. Grounded in feminist political ecology, the analysis demonstrates how injury, respiratory discomfort, and toxic exposure are rendered ordinary through idioms of normality and endurance, producing a moral economy in which hazard becomes an expected and even valorised condition of labour, closely tied to masculine identities of provision, responsibility, and entrepreneurial self-making. At the same time, maternal and caregiving bodies inhabit the same toxic environment as burning and dismantling, yet their specific vulnerabilities remain largely unspoken. This silence functions not as an absence of knowledge, but as a gendered technology of governance through which reproductive harm is rendered ordinary and politically unproblematic. Situating these dynamics within global circuits of value extraction and development intervention, the article theorises slow violence, incremental, cumulative harm lived through breath, fatigue, and routine bodily compromise, as a condition that enables accumulation to proceed without enforceable regulation. It argues that gender is not simply an axis of inequality within informal recycling economies, but a constitutive mechanism through which development operates as governance without government, allowing environmental and health costs to be externalised while global value chains remain operational.