Risk and Feminist Utopia: Radicalizing the Future

Jeanne Cortiel

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2018, vol. 77, issue 5, 1353-1376

Abstract: Risk has taken over the world as the major way of conceptualizing the future as bleak, if one follows Ulrich Beck’s claim in World at Risk (2007). However, there is also a distinctly utopian strand in American risk discourse, one that has, from the outset, been linked to feminist perspectives. Indeed, when risk entered American culture in the 19th century, immediately women’s rights philosophy began to draw on futures shaped by risk, establishing self‐ownership and agency in a context that denied such freedom to women and non‐white men. This article explores connections between risk, futurity, agency, and selfhood as expressed in feminist thought, drawing a line between Margaret Fuller’s political essay Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Joanna Russ’s science fiction novel The Female Man (1975), and Mary Daly’s radical feminist manifesto Quintessence: Realizing the Archaic Future (1998). The aim is not to develop a narrative of development but to see how risk has become useful in shaping distinctly feminist visions of the future. More specifically, I would like to see how risk‐taking has enabled feminist social dreaming. It is precisely this groundedness in risk that allows feminist utopian visions to remain productive in popular culture beyond feminist discourse. When, for example, the movie Alien (1979, dir. Ridley Scott) introduced a female protagonist to a science fiction/horror action plot, it drew on feminist utopian narrative patterns grounded in risk and risk‐taking. Feminist utopian visions as well as their continuations in popular culture thus bring out the subversive potential of risk for feminist theory and practice.

Date: 2018
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