Boundaries of Work: Elite Black African Identities and Place of “(Re)productive” Labor in Kenya's Extractive Industries

ABSTRACT This paper examines the positioning of elite Black African women in extractive labor spaces, arguing that their experiences are shaped by interrelated feminist concepts of care, time, experience, equality, and difference. Using an African feminist theoretical framework, the study recenters African epistemologies of work and embodiment to challenge dominant Western narratives that have historically cast Black African subjects through tropes of crisis, conflict, and vulnerability. Such narratives I argue obscure the everyday realities of Black African women's labor while reinforcing colonial conceptualizations of work and African bodies which situates blackness as commodities and sexual objects. Through African feminisms concepts such as care, time, and embodied experience acquire new analytical depth, revealing a culturally grounded understanding of Black womanhood that disrupts hegemonic constructions of the extractive worker as White, male, physically dominant, and inherently suited extractive labor (oil and gas sector). This aligns with long‐standing labor patterns in Africa, where women have been central to agricultural and artisanal mining economies and have shaped community and household structures of work. This further demonstrates how colonial legacies and contemporary capitalist practices continue to marginalize elite Black African women within extractive workplaces, producing exclusion, discomfort, and structural constraints that limit their full participation. By foregrounding care, difference, time, equality and experience as intersecting terrains, the paper illuminates the complex realities of Black African women's everyday lives and exposes the persistent competing gendered and racialized assumptions of work that shape extractive labor.