Negotiating Survival: Gendered Precarity, Social Reproduction, and Power Within Constraint Among Women Rag Pickers in Urban India

This article examines women rag pickers’ labour in urban India through feminist political economy, embodiment, and social reproduction. Drawing on fieldwork from Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, it argues that women’s agency in informal waste work operates through responsibility-laden survival rather than empowerment or accumulation. Widowed, separated, and deserted women—often sole household earners—experience intensified bodily depletion through long work hours, chronic illness, time poverty, and debt, yet simultaneously exercise everyday authority over income allocation, spatial mobility, market negotiations, and household governance. Conceptualised here as power within constraint, this relational agency sustains families and urban recycling systems while leaving structural inequalities intact. The article further offers a feminist critique of urban sustainability narratives, showing how cleanliness and recycling regimes depend on women’s embodied labour while rendering them institutionally invisible. By foregrounding women rag pickers as economic managers rather than residual workers, the study reframes informal sanitation as a feminist political economy issue and calls for gender-just urban futures centred on labour dignity, bodily integrity, and social reproduction.