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Paper short abstract

This paper uses a feminist political economy lens to examine how female tomato traders and queen mothers in Ghana navigate capitalist and patriarchal hierarchies and culturally embedded care norms, revealing informal markets as sites of governance, moral contestation, and power negotiation.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the positionality of female wholesale traders in Ghana’s tomato value chain through a feminist political economy lens. These traders and their leaders, the so-called “tomato queens”, occupy a paradoxical position: celebrated as guarantors of food security yet stigmatised for dominating the markets and setting high prices, at the expense of smallholder farmers and consumers alike. Their contribution, while essential to Ghana’s agrifood system, is frequently framed as exploitative, raising questions about legitimacy, morality, and power in informal economies. These aspects become even more pronounced when taking gendered and culturally grounded expectations for women's care and reproductive responsibilities into account.

Drawing on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in Accra (2024–2025), I explore how these women negotiate patriarchal and capitalist hierarchical structures within informally organised everyday economically relevant social and business practices. Rather than viewing informality as marginal, this research situates it as a site of governance and contestation, where institutional regulation and moral distinctions are continuously configured and challenged.

By foregrounding traders’ positionality within intersecting systems of power, this paper contributes to feminist debates on labour and value in formal-informal economic continuums. It also engages with anthropological discussions on how gendered actors challenge and reproduce institutional norms in contexts marked by economic precarity and shifting moral orders. Ultimately, this study illuminates the entanglement of gender, capital, and authority in the everyday political economy of food systems in the Global South.