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Paper short abstract:

Gender is a critical structural element defining informal traders as a social problem, clearly visible in Kumasi, Ghana in explicit verbal and physical abuse of women traders and craft workers as women. Men saw no targeting and more respect during price control, relocation and demolition.

Paper long abstract:

The streets and markets of Kumasi, Ghana's second largest city, have witnessed fifty years of hostile actions against traders. Interviews, observation and archival research detail gender disparities in rhetoric and tactics that constructed informal trading as a social problem. Price control enforcement consistently hit female-dominated commodities much harder than male. Despite ethnic targeting of "northerners," public media denounced traders as "those women" and defended them as "our mothers." One official solution to corruption in the cloth trade was forbidding women to sell cloth. Women foodstuff sellers faced arbitrary price controls, outright confiscation and physical violence. Men who sold spare parts, drove trucks and made kente and adinkra cloth, by contrast, were consulted to set price levels according to their input prices. Foreign "northern" men were accused of currency speculation and their stalls demolished, but they were never stripped or beaten in public like some women. Attacks on street and roadside vendors date from the colonial "hawker wars," when squads of sanitary inspectors terrorized bakers and cooked food vendors, eating their wares. Current neoliberal policies preclude price control, but street clearances and market relocations continue regularly as globalization increases the pressure to privatize prime land use for high-end commercial and residential use. Female-identified markets have been relocated repeatedly with, little notice or consideration of potential losses compared to male carpentry or auto repair. Gender explains most directly these contrasts between informal services considered productive or parasitic and between respect and disdain.