Mississippi front-line recovery work after Hurricane Katrina: an analysis of the intersections of gender, race, and class in advocacy, power relations, and health.

By disrupting the routine practices and social structures that support social hierarchy, disasters provide a unique opportunity to observe how gender, race, and class power relations are enacted and reconstituted to shape health inequities. Using a feminist intersectional framework, we examine the dynamic relationships among a government/corporate alliance, front-line disaster recovery workers, and disadvantaged residents in Mississippi Gulf Coast communities in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which struck in August, 2005. Data were collected between January 2007 and October 2008 through field observations, public document analysis, and in-depth interviews with 32 front-line workers representing 27 non-governmental, nonprofit community-based organizations. Our analysis reveals how power relationships among these groups operated at the macro-level of the political economy as well as in individual lives, increasing health risks among both the disadvantaged and the front-line workers serving and advocating on their behalf. Socially situated as outsiders-within, front-line recovery workers operated in the middle ground between the disadvantaged populations they served and the powerful alliance that controlled access to essential resources. From this location, they both observed and were subject to the processes guiding the allocation of resources and their unequal outcomes. Following a brief period of hope for progressive change, recovery workers became increasingly stressed and fatigued, particularly from lack of communication and coordination, limited resources, insufficient capacity to meet overwhelming demands, and gendered and racialized mechanisms of marginalization and exclusion. The personal and collective health burdens borne by these front-line recovery workers--predominantly women and people of color - exemplify the ways in which the social relations of power and control contribute to health and social inequities.