Confidant par excellence, advisors and healers: women traders' intersecting identities and roles in Senegal

Characteristics associated with West African women traders often hinge on their resilience, ingenuity and savvy business practices under precarious economic conditions and changing ecologies. Moreover, traders are defined, identified and classified by their trade and the commodities associated with their trading practice. However, a social analysis and ethnography of trading practices challenges this taxonomy and suggests the relational and social embeddedness of such economic transactions and the unexpected intersecting roles traders perform as confidants, advisers and healers. This paper examines the multiple roles that Senegalese traders embody and perform and the vast repertoire of knowledge and cultural registers they employ as advisers on sexuality, matrimonial affairs and conjugality. It posits to reframe trade and the marketplace, not only as a fulcrum of economic transaction, but also as locus of affective interactions, performative-counselling practices and fluid space where traders impart knowledge to their female clientele on a wide spectrum of issues such as sexuality, conjugality and the aesthetics of intimacy. Lastly, it seeks to unveil new analytics and theorising on the evolving, embodied and performative roles of women traders and market women, while proving contextual and culturally-textured insights on 'counselling' and its interpretation in Senegal.