A Framework of Intersectional Risk Theory in the Age of Ambivalence 9783030335236, 9783030335243

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Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty Series Editors Patrick Brown University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Anna Olofsson Mid Sweden University, Östersund, Sweden Jens O. Zinn University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Palgrave’s Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty series publishes monographs, edited volumes and Palgrave Pivots that capture and analyse how societies, organisations, groups and individuals experience and confront uncertain futures. This series will provide a multidisciplinary home to consolidate this dynamic and growing academic field, bringing together and representing the state of the art on various topics within the broader domain of critical studies of risk and uncertainty. Moreover, the series is sensitive to the broader political, structural and socio-cultural conditions in which particular approaches to complexity and uncertainty become legitimated ahead of others. It provides cutting edge theoretical and empirical, as well as established and emerging methodological contributions, and welcomes projects on risk, trust, hope, intuition, emotions and faith. Explorations into the institutionalisation of approaches to uncertainty within regulatory and other governmental regimes are also of interest. More information about this series at http://​www.​palgrave.​com/​ gp/​series/​15840

Katarina Giritli Nygren, Anna Olofsson and Susanna Öhman

A Framework of Intersectional Risk Theory in the Age of Ambivalence

Katarina Giritli Nygren Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall and Östersund, Sweden Anna Olofsson Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall and Östersund, Sweden Susanna Öhman Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall and Östersund, Sweden

ISSN 2523-7268 e-ISSN 2523-7276 Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty ISBN 978-3-030-33523-6 e-ISBN 978-3-030-33524-3 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33524-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the

material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image © Martin Barraud / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents 1 The Age of Ambivalence Introduction Ambivalence as an Epistemological and Ethical Position Outline of the Book Chapter 2.​Conceptual Frames:​Risk and Intersectionalit​y Chapter 3.​Risk, Inequality, and (Post-) Structure:​Risk as Governing Chapter 4.​The Performative Aspects of Risk and the Constitution of Subjects Chapter 5.​Doing, Redoing, and Doing Away:​Performing Risk Chapter 6.​The Lived Experience of Risk:​Multiple Standpoints and Agencies Chapter 7.​Risk Networks:​Actors, Actants, and Assemblages Chapter 8.​Methodological Applications Chapter 9.​Risk, Intersectionalit​y, and Ambivalence:​A Better Way to Understand Inequality Epilogue:​Imagining the Future Differently To the Reader References 2 Conceptual Frames:​Risk and Intersectionalit​y Introduction Risk, Uncertainty, and Power Theoretical Approaches to Risk and Inequality Intersectionalit​y:​Moving Concepts Across Fields Intersectional Risk Theory and the Doing of Risk

References 3 Risk, Inequality, and (Post) Structure:​Risk as Governing Introduction The Governmentality of Risk and Security—Attending to the Concept of Regime Risk Regulation Regimes and Gender Regimes An Intersectional Approach to Risk Regulation Regimes Bringing Ambivalence into the Structure of Inequality:​ Concluding Remarks References 4 The Performative Aspects of Risk and the Constitution of Subjects Introduction Acts of Interpellation and Ambivalence Normalisation, Biopolitics of Risk, and Inequality Performativity, Subjectification​, and Risk Morality, Risk, and Its Intersectional Implications Concluding Remarks:​From Risk Performativity to the Performance of Risk References 5 Doing, Redoing, and Doing Away:​Performing Risk Introduction Reflexivity, Individualisatio​n, and Risk Subjectivities Performing Risk:​Doing Gender Following Lines, Orientation, and Doing Risk Passing, Avoiding, and Managing Risk Coming up Against Lines or Destabilising Dynamics of Power Through the Redoing and Undoing of Risk

Concluding Remarks:​From Doing Risk to Living with Risk References 6 The Lived Experience of Risk:​Multiple Standpoints and Agencies Introduction The First-person Character of Living with Risk and Uncertainty Existential Phenomenology and Engaging with Risk in NonWestern Settings Feminist Epistemologies and Studies of Risk Conclusions References 7 Risk Networks:​Actors, Actants, and Assemblages Introduction To Turn or Not to Turn:​Materialism in the Wake of Poststructuralis​m The Material Turn in Studies of Risks Assemblages of Posthumans at Risk Conclusions References 8 Methodological Applications Introduction Interpreting Risk:​Discourses and Practices Example of Group-centred Analysis Examples of System-centred Analysis Using Quantitative Data to Address Critical Questions on Risk From Methodology to Methods Exploring Risk and Intersectionalit​y:​An Empirical Example of Performing Performative Notions of Risk

Intersectional Risk Analysis:​Concluding Remarks References 9 Risk, Intersectionalit​y, and Ambivalence:​A Way to Understand Inequality Introduction Intersectional Risk-Regulating Regimes Performative Subjectification​and Risk Doing, Redoing, and Undoing Risk Standpoint Existentialism Assemblages Concluding Remarks References Epilogue:​Imagining the Future Differently References Index

© The Author(s) 2020 K. Giritli Nygren et al., A Framework of Intersectional Risk Theory in the Age of Ambivalence, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33524-3_1

1. The Age of Ambivalence Katarina Giritli Nygren1   , Anna Olofsson1   and Susanna Öhman1   (1) Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall and Östersund, Sweden

 

  Katarina Giritli Nygren (Corresponding author) Email: [email protected]   Anna Olofsson Email: [email protected]   Susanna Öhman Email: [email protected] Keywords Risk – Intersectionality – Ambivalence – Uncertainty

Introduction This book brings feminist theories and concepts to the sociology of risk in an attempt to define intersectional risk theories in times of ambivalence. Why ambivalence? As Smart states: ‘Ambivalence, both analytical and existential, is an understandable consequence of not knowing, and knowing that one cannot know for sure, precisely what will emerge from the various complex processes of restructuring through which modernity is continually (re)constituted. Late modernity, or the postmodern reconditioning of modernity, constitutes a form of social life in which ambivalence is pervasive’ (Smart 1999, p. 11). This is a framework that embraces a critical perspective of ambivalence to unpack risk, conceptualising social as well as material

artefacts in terms of risk and its relation to power. Therefore, the scope of the book is not to explain the world and everything observed within it through a few concepts or mechanisms. Rather, it seeks to define a frame, or frames, through which we can begin to deepen our understanding of certain phenomena, namely risk, power, and inequality, and to suggest a number of theoretical entry points to such analyses. A central perspective in this process is the feminist concept of intersectionality—that is, awareness of the simultaneity of multiple oppressions and privileges that are historically and contextually embedded. The outcome is a theoretical framework that we call intersectional risk theory, which seeks not only to contribute to the scientific understanding of risk and inequality but to provide tools for tracing cracks and openings in the fabric of power and for rethinking risk governance in contemporary society. Intersectionality as a concept was popularised by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) to account for the ways race, gender, and class intersect to position black women in particular ways vis-à-vis the law. From the first, intersectionality was thus strongly invested in the intersection of race, class, and gender and closely related to black feminism (see Hill Collins 2008; Hill Collins and Bilge 2016). Today the concept of intersectionality has travelled far from its original field, and the insights it offers for understanding oppression are now used in diverse ways in different contexts. As with the notion of subjectivity, constituted by mutually reinforcing vectors of race, gender, class, and sexuality, intersectionality has emerged as the primary theoretical tool designed to interrogate hierarchy, hegemony, and exclusivity. In this first chapter, we will set the scene for the book by introducing our view of ambivalence and then present a short overview of the book. Before we turn to ambivalence, there are a couple of other issues important to discuss and position ourselves against. To begin with, it is important to acknowledge that risk theories are drawn from, and in turn contribute to, a particularly Western conceptualisation of risk analysis that is progressive, evidence based, and rational, situated historically and socially within a postEnlightenment tradition of modernity, postmodernity, and development discourse. Further, social science theorising and

investigating risk are often deeply grounded in the enlightened history of the Global North; the approach deployed by the authors of this book is no exception. In addition, although understandings of risk have not developed along the same historical trajectory all around the world, the concept has been deployed universally. Both the development of understanding risk and its deployment has happened through the imperialism of certain scientific practices and historical phases of colonialism, postcolonialism, and neocolonialism, which carry a progressive, scientific paradigm underpinned by an unchallenged assumption of objectivity (Desmond 2015). This leads us to question certain premises that expose the historical framing of risk as a construct of the post-Enlightenment Global North, given the necessary ambivalence of how concepts such as risk and uncertainty are applied, understood, and questioned in various contexts. Even though intersectional risk theory can be said to have developed from the standpoint of a ‘Northern’ perspective, our intentions are that the intersectional approach should help us to open the door to possible resignifications and to embrace ambivalence from a critical standpoint. Peggy Phelan (2003, p. 149) argues that in a world beset by fundamentalism, feminism foregrounds ambivalence as a necessary way of viewing the world—not as a sort of resigned pluralism or ‘anything goes’ but as a conscious approach or strategic positioning against fundamental power structures that define the world and ‘know’ it, causing contradictions and other interests, perspectives, and stories that also describe the world to be colonised and/or disappear. Moreover, by picking up what is relevant in intersectional theory for what we intend to do in this book we also appropriate the concept of intersectionality for the purpose of unpacking risk and its relation to oppressive structures and inequalities. In other words, in our search for new insights and understandings of risk we allow ourselves to select concepts and thinking within intersectional theory and critical research more broadly that we find relevant, rather than embracing the entire frameworks. For instance, although much research with an intersectional perspective problematises identity as identity politics, multiple identities, and identity work, we leave these elements more or less out in this book. This is also an example of how we use and define ambivalence as a theoretical method. Thus, this ambivalence allows us

to see and so to conduct a dialogue amongst different types of knowledge or conversation, which permit multiple meanings. As such, ambivalence can also be viewed as a form of resistance towards reductionist and dogmatic epistemological views (Griffin et al. 2013).

Ambivalence as an Epistemological and Ethical Position Although the concept of ambivalence is widely used in everyday speech and in various scientific fields, its meaning and usage seem to vary. Here, in a book whose title includes the word ‘ambivalence’, it seems appropriate to attempt to bring clarity to the concept in this context whilst at the same time pursuing theoretical coherence. One claim commonly made for ambivalence is that the concept reaches beyond dualistic ideas such as ‘either/or’ to favour thinking that includes ‘both’. In so doing, it accommodates the simultaneous existence of conflicting ideas, which to us seems a productive way forward in studying risk. As the authors of this text, we might be understood as three individuals sharing the same view of risk or the same theoretical point of departure, which is not at all true. We have different and sometimes contradictory ways of viewing science and the world, and whilst this has sometimes been a source of difficulty in writing the book, it has also made us aware of the need of—as well as the benefit from— incorporating ambivalence in the study of risk. Ambivalence was first advanced theoretically as a psycho(patho)logical concept by Eugen Bleuler at the beginning of the twentieth century to describe the presence of conflicting feelings or opposed impulses of the same intensity with respect to an object, as in the often-used example of eating or not eating (Stotz-Ingenlath 2000). This is also pertinent in terms of the perspective of an individual’s ability to hate and love the same object; Bleuler says that ambivalence is the exception when a normal person is making decisions between contradictory values, but in a pathological situation these opposing feelings are not separated —love might be intensified and hate take the form of an exaggerated declaration of love. As something quite distinct from ‘psychological ambivalence’, Robert Merton and Elinor Barber

(1976) introduced the term ‘sociological ambivalence’ in the 1960s. Here we start to see some of the things we find relevant for a theory of intersectional risk: Sociological ambivalence relates to the ways in which the relationship between individual/subjective and collective/structural identity generates conflicting frames, sometimes described as a pendulum moving between two more or less opposite positions (Merton and Barber 1976). Ambivalence has subsequently been assimilated by other sociologists—for example in the field of risk studies, where the term is used to describe contingency, uncertainty, and the experiential and affective dimension of late modernity (see also Arribas-Ayllon and Bartlett 2014 and works by Mary Douglas 2001; Zygmunt Bauman 1990; Ortwinn Renn 2008; Ulrich Beck 1992, amongst others). In short, risk and uncertainty are linked in the sociology of risk, where ambivalence is often expressed in terms of reflexivity (Castells 1989) and social change both inside and outside the frame of modern (risk) society (Beck 1992; Giddens 1990; Lash 2003). We would like to develop this further by embracing the potential of ambivalence in the theorisation of risk and inequality. We scrutinise risk theory for ambivalence and focus particularly on the work on reflexivity in order to develop this further. Reflexivity is an ambivalent concept and a recurring theme in Ulrich Beck’s writings: Reflexivity is social self-confrontation in the face of ambivalence, as the ideals and technologies of the Enlightenment—not least the technologies of science and capitalism—have had catastrophic side effects and inconceivable consequences. In Beck’s words, ‘in risk society the unforeseeable side and after-effects … lead to what had been considered overcome, the realm of the uncertain, of ambivalence, in short, of alienation’ (Beck et al. 1994, p. 10; cf. Bauman 1991). Whilst Habermas and Giddens in their discussion of reflexivity and late modernity object primarily to the determinism of structural functionalism and elaborate the dialectics between actor and structure, Beck and Lash instead consider reflexivity (ambivalence) to be the (only) characteristic of late modernity: the dissolution of dualism as well as dialectics. If theorists of modernity have assumed that the development of societies is linear, Beck et al. (1994) contend that late modern reflexivity is characterised by non-linearity, which can also be interpreted as a postmodern criticism of modernist theory (Lash 2003).

In line with Beck, Horlick-Jones (2005) argues that, contrary to the present argument, the institutions of modernity, such as state, class, family, gender, and ethnicity are eroding; knowledge is characterised by uncertainty, and the subject is left making sense of risky technologies based on a bricolage of various discourses and norms related to the particular process where knowledge and life prospects are uncertain (Lash 2003). The important point, however, is that Beck—as well as Lash and Latour (1993), although from different standpoints—can be seen as amongst those theorists seeking to overcome the linearity of the Enlightenment (and therefore dualism), based on knowledge claims that read the world as ambivalent (Lash 2003). This is promising, but we search for a more critical perspective, and therefore, move on to poststructural thinking. In critical theory—not least in feminist research as we already pointed out—the concept of ambivalence has acquired an explicit epistemological meaning in relation to how we understand the relationship between experience and discourse, agency and structure. What connects the sociological and epistemological meanings of ambivalence is that both emphasise a sort of embodied link between classic dualities such as body–soul, agent–structure, and individual– society. This is also a question of ethics, leading to another key dimension of ambivalence. Zygmunt Bauman (1990), perhaps the leading advocate of this approach, has commented at length on the necessity of ambivalence, especially in relation to issues of ethics and morality. The Enlightenment’s promises of a completely manageable and demystified world have not come to fruition; instead, despite the fact that there are some risks that have been reduced, there is an idea that the Western world is under constant threat, which is all the more frightening because of the threats’ fluidity and elusiveness. As the carrier of Enlightenment ideals, the modern project has yielded an aporetic and ambivalent moral code. Aporia here pertains to a conflict, for example between right and wrong, to which there is no solution; and the situation is ambivalent in that doubt and insecurity are constant features of life. This brings ambivalence to the interpersonal level, and in a number of Bauman’s texts (see e.g. 1991, 1995) a key theme is the idea ethically defensible actions in the presence of the other. Bauman’s postmodern ethics cannot be considered a new moral

code but rather a discussion of the problems of using an either-or moral code, wherein any action is either wright or wrong, or people are either good or evil. Bauman argues that we must, once and for all, acknowledge the ambivalence and uncertainty of ethics and move beyond modernistic attempts to find a uniform moral code in the absence of a god. In this way, the acceptance and welcoming of ambivalence also represent a break with the modern project’s search for order and distinctness or being able to separate right from wrong (Bauman 1991). Our understanding is that in a world where complex and contradictory power structures shape our social and political lives, understanding the relationship between history, consciousness, and agency depends on the idea that these power structures are multiple, fluid, and intersecting. Thus, we need to focus more on process and form rather than on binary expressions. There is a need to focus more on the relationships between, for instance, risk analysis and power structures than the question of ‘what is a risk’ and ‘what is not a risk’. In moving away from dualistic thinking, ambivalence captures a conceptualisation of consciousness, power, and authority that is frequently contradictory. Amongst other things, it means that we need theoretical tensions and inconsistencies in our analysis because these provide valuable insights into the dissonances of life as it is lived. This dilemma has been the subject of frequent discussion amongst feminists, and the ambivalence of feminist theory and practice is clear, as the urgent desire for increased equality has, paradoxically, prompted new divisions. As feminist criticism unified the group women (as subordinate) and the group men (as superior), differences within the group of women and between men became less visible. In addition, these differences structure power and often prove greater than the differences between men and women. Black women, lesbians, women with disabilities, and others began to ask new and complex questions, making it increasingly clear that the creation of a ‘community’ depends on how power relationships interact intersectionally, resulting in new ideals that need to be properly considered (Hill Collins 1989). This is about how uniform signifiers and categorisations always fail and the awkward feeling of being assigned to a category, women for example, where you feel you do not belong. Or where you are supposed to

belong, yet you do not quite belong. For that reason, it is important to remain critical of such set identities. This can be compared to what we referred to above as a strategic position of ambivalence (cf. Fahlgren et al. 2016)—that is, holding a position that does not attempt to resolve or deny ambivalence, as previously described. Instead, it involves raising awareness of the broader situation and maintaining this ambivalent position—making use of it by confronting differences that help open up other types of knowledge and other ways of viewing the world or the self in pursuit of deeper understanding. For this we can learn that to be a subject is to be dependent on the discourses, ideas, techniques, and devices that shape us as part of a world that is to some extent established by norms and normality. In this context, it seems important to note that this extends beyond how we are influenced by ideas and social constructs to the more complicated interaction amongst materialities, practices, techniques, languages, and so on. So, where does this line of reasoning lead? Could ambivalence be considered an epistemology, in which reflexivity and ‘objectualism’ (Latour 2003, for more information see Chap. 7) replace dualism in terms of actor–structure? Or does it maintain the binary worldview of the Enlightenment, through dialectics, presupposing that actor and structure, body and soul have to be thought of simultaneously, thus, we are unable to understand soul without the body, and ultimately, we cannot think equality without inequality? In other words, dialectics presuppose dualism, a world divided between equal and unequal, good and evil, actor and structure, even though Merton and Barber’s pendulum swings between the individual’s different social positions, generating ambivalence as it never stops in the middle (Merton and Barber 1976). This simultaneous existence of extremes informs the emergence of ambivalence. What is, then, the particular contribution of this all important notion of ambivalence? The answer is that it opens up room for a kind of eclecticism, to build a theory where the pieces do not, and should not, always fit together, since we need different angles and perspectives to fully embrace the complexity of cohesion, agency, discourse, and the spatial.

Outline of the Book

The theoretical framework of this book presents conceptual apparatuses for critical and feminist analyses of risk, power, and inequality by embracing ambivalence and it departs from an intersectional perspective. To identify such tools, we will uncover the social world of risk bit by bit through a discussion of external constraints on human beings that are commonly described as ‘social structures’: collective habits formalised as legal rules, policy, norms, moral obligations, and so on, to ensure the cohesion and continued reproduction of a given socio-cultural system. Another major theme explored later in the book is the somewhat opposing concept of ‘action’ or ‘agency’, referring to the individual subject’s intrinsic will and ability to act independently, and the possibility of change and resistance. In sociology, this agency–structure divide has been expressed in many ways, including individual–collective, person–society, micro–macro, desire–repression, and creativity–constraint. The distinction has been rejected by poststructuralists such as French philosophers Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida and the opposing terms have been reintegrated in structuration theory and institutional ethnography; later in this book we will include the alternative understandings of the social world these thinkers have contributed. Social theorists have grappled with issues of structure and agency for generations (Connell 2004), and at first glance, the pieces of the jigsaw seem to fit together well within this familiar conceptual divide. However, when pieces from different puzzles are mixed and the intersectional approach to inequality and risk enters the picture, the results appear ambiguous. Needless to say, this means that we are also critical of some of the theories and perspectives discussed in this volume. For example, in Chap. 7 when we present theories on networks, assemblages, and (new) materialism—theories that privilege fluidity, tactility, ontology, affect, and information—we still hold on to the ways that intersectionality privileges naming, visuality, epistemology, representation, and meaning as our standpoint. Hence, we consider aspects of particular writers’ argumentation useful for an intersectional risk theory, whilst at the same time we also find other claims and conceptualisations problematic and not in line with our intersectional perspective. Rather than attempting to force the pieces together or to conceal their lack of fit, this book invites the reader to consider that the

pieces need not necessarily fit, because only in a broken mirror can we gain true perspective on our own time. The book comprises nine chapters, including this first chapter, and an epilogue. Whilst intersectionality, risk, and inequality are present in all chapters, the frame of ambivalence is mainly discussed in this first and the last chapter. The chapter structure does not reflect strict boundaries between different theories as much as ways of understanding the interplay between risk and inequality. The following six chapters outline theoretical and analytical points of departure and associated developments. In Chap. 2, risk and intersectionality are explored and intersectional risk theory is introduced. In Chap. 3, governance and normalisation of risk are discussed as constituting a purely structural process that takes the subject for granted. Chapter 4 examines how external constraints determine the subject but focuses on how the subject becomes possible through structure—for example, through interpellation and as a moral subject—and what it means for risk and inequality when one is ‘at risk’ or ‘a risk’. In Chap. 5, the subject is foregrounded as an actor, although still constrained by structural processes. Here, the focus shifts towards how discourses of risk are negotiated, understood, and resisted in relation to the intersections of different power structures. Chapter 6 investigates the phenomenology of risk, turning to the subject behind the mask and asking whether a conjunction can be found amongst risk, power, and inequality beyond norms and hegemonic structures, or at least how this is played out in contemporary theorising. Chapter 7 brings the theoretical section to a close by addressing ‘the material turn’ in the social sciences, introducing some insights that we consider important for an intersectional analysis of risk. Next, Chap. 8 discusses how these different theoretical perspectives can inform methodological choices and empirical investigations. The book ends with Chap. 9, focusing on the framework of intersectional risk theory, and an epilogue that sketches some thoughts about a different future. Presented below is a brief outline of each chapter in turn.

Chapter 2. Conceptual Frames: Risk and Intersectionality This chapter introduces the central concepts of the book: risk and intersectionality. First, risk as a theoretical concept is introduced and

defined, followed by a discussion of the relationship between risk, uncertainty, and power. Thereafter, the concept of intersectionality and its development are presented and our own standpoint is defined. We do not simply appropriate a concept that has become very popular across various fields of research, but rather, we want acknowledge and use this perspective in the tradition of critical gender studies to make new understandings of risk possible. The chapter ends with a brief introduction of intersectional risk theory, and how new understandings and analyses of risk can be achieved through an intersectional perspective.

Chapter 3. Risk, Inequality, and (Post-) Structure: Risk as Governing This chapter elaborates how intersectional risk theory relates to, departs from, and contributes to understandings of risk as a governing societal principle, not only as a tenet of the risk society thesis but more especially in the context of risk regimes and as a technology for risk governance. We explore theoretical accounts of how risk and, more specifically, risk governance and regulation, have become elements of power in the contemporary world, or at least in the Global North, (re)producing inequalities of health and wealth. In particular, the chapter examines theoretical understandings of risk and inequality inspired by the governmentality perspective, including the colonisation of risk and risk regimes and how conceptualisations of normalisation invite an intersectional analysis of social structures and risk, bridging the divide between the theorising of gender and risk.

Chapter 4. The Performative Aspects of Risk and the Constitution of Subjects This chapter continues the exploration of risk in relation to structure by introducing normalisation, interpellation, and performativity vis-à-vis risk. Normalisation combined with intersectionality enables an analysis of normative notions of risk governance, where biopolitics, biopower, and ethopower are key concepts. A large part of the chapter presents and discusses Judith Butler’s theoretical development of performativity and interpellation and considers how her insights can contribute to the understanding of ‘at risk’ and ‘risky’ subject positions. This discussion

is followed by a section that engages in the moral aspects of risk and self-governance through moral and performative discourses.

Chapter 5. Doing, Redoing, and Doing Away: Performing Risk This chapter theoretically explores performance and performativity and understandings of the power of risk and how it can be challenged. To fully understand the power dimensions of risk and how these can be challenged, there is a need to address both practice and performativity. Agency is in the foreground, but the discussion includes how agency relates to ideology and other social structures and how reality relates to discourse. The ontological status of ‘risk’—that is, whether it is ‘real’ or merely constructed—has been the subject of intense debate, and there is no consensus within the research community on this issue. The chapter includes a discussion of how we can gain knowledge about the relationship between the awareness of risk and the materialised consequences in the life of the individual. It shows the importance of the local and the particular in gaining knowledge of the relationship between reality and discourse. However, the chapter begins with an overview of risk theories that situate risk subjects in an individualised and reflexive context, and moves from there to a feminist discussion of the relationship between the performance of risk and the doing of gender. The chapter ends with a discussion on resistance and how the relationship between risk and inequality can be redone or undone.

Chapter 6. The Lived Experience of Risk: Multiple Standpoints and Agencies Turning to the phenomenology of risk, we unpack the theoretical underpinnings of intersectional risk theory, including standpoint theory, life-worlds, and embodiment. Here, we ask if it is possible to trace a conjunction amongst risk, power, and inequality in understandings of everyday practices of risk. Drawing particularly on feminist epistemologies based on the insights of standpoint theory together with Simone de Beauvoir’s writings on phenomenology, we want to pay attention to the importance of analyses of the subjective first-person character of risk awareness. Further, pursuing our interrogation of intersectional risk theory, we show how the subject can

sometimes transcend both the social and the material when confronted with risk in everyday life. We believe that it is important to develop our understanding of agency, or agencies, to uncover the subject—or more precisely, the individual reality of sensual and corporeal experience.

Chapter 7. Risk Networks: Actors, Actants, and Assemblages Here, we relate our analysis of risk to what has sometimes been called ‘the material turn’ in the social sciences (Van der Tuin and Dolphijn 2010), introducing some insights that we consider important for an intersectional analysis of risk. Although it has not been elaborated upon in previous chapters, these insights bear some relation to the conceptual developments discussed so far. Following a brief overview of the material turn and how it contributes to our own framework, we consider the influence of new materialism on risk research. Returning to intersectional risk theory, we use different examples to illustrate what rejection of the dualist epistemology means (and does not mean) from our perspective.

Chapter 8. Methodological Applications Chapter 8 explores some key methodological applications of using intersectional approaches to analyse risk. The point of departure is that multiple methods are needed to explore the different perspectives of risk and inequality. The chapter begins with a discussion of methodological implications of an intersectional approach in terms of fluidity and stability, followed by an exploration of different methods divided by the structure–agency categorisation. The first category, which is not a category so much as dimensions of system-centred analysis, is exemplified by two studies that analyse two discourses, namely the Swedish policy for the Arctic and the media reporting of a Swedish wildfire in 2014. The second category, which represents different group-centred analyses, is illustrated by an examination of how risk is handled in everyday life. Thereafter, the possibility of applying quantitative methods whilst departing from intersectional risk theory is discussed and examples given.

Chapter 9. Risk, Intersectionality, and Ambivalence: A Better Way to Understand Inequality The final chapter sums up the various lines of argument in the book and adds key concepts, or conceptual apparatuses, of intersectional risk theory that have been defined and analysed in the previous chapters. These concepts include intersectional risk positions, performative subjectification, doing, redoing, and undoing risk, standpoint existentialism, and assemblages. The chapter presents them one by one and discusses their contributions to intersectional risk theory. It also reconnects with ambivalence and positions intersectional risk theory and its conceptual tools in such a frame, arguing that ambivalence embraces theoretical tensions and inconsistencies that provide insights into the dissonances of life as it is lived.

Epilogue: Imagining the Future Differently The epilogue changes the perspective and provides insights into the future through a discussion of the need for new utopias, as a method for movement beyond, approaching a grace that is both existential and relational. Utopias are particularly interesting in the context of risk because utopia is often claimed to be related to terror and violence in totalitarian settings whilst it is supposed to represent the concept of a perfect and harmonious society. Utopia, as method, must therefore involve a continual process of change where we repeatedly discuss our structured relationships and what they mean and how they can be challenged. This means both working against all forms of violence and oppression, such as those that are currently experienced, and seeking new stories and understandings of the contingency of equality. There is an ongoing need for different fantasies and visions and a need for places where these visions can develop and be enacted, not only in the centre but also on the periphery. Exploring the openings and closures of Levitas’ (2013) Utopia as method, we will call for intersectional awareness and a publicly engaged sociology that attempts not only to imagine but also to make the world more equal; such a sociology has the capacity to embody hope.

To the Reader

We imagine you, the reader of this book, as someone who is interested in thinking critically about the role of risk, and similar concepts, in current societies. You might be a scholar who is already established in the sociology of risk and uncertainty, but you may also be searching for new perspectives. Or, you might be a feminist, critical, and/or gender scholar who engages in risk issues and finds the intersection of risk and inequality pertinent. Or perhaps you are a student who is curious about these issues and prepared to take on a book that hopefully inspires you to take up further reading and pursue your own studies. We expect you to read and react—not necessarily agreeing with us, since we are three authors that much of the time do not agree with each other.

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Douglas, M. (2001). Dealing with uncertainty. Ethical Perspectives, 8(3), 145–155. [Crossref] Fahlgren, S., Giritli Nygren, K., & Johansson, A. (2016). Utmaningar: feminismens (o)möjlighet under nyliberalismen. Malmö: Universus Academic Press. Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Griffin, G., Bränström-Öhman, A., & Kalman, H. (2013). The emotional politics of research collaboration. New York: Routledge. [Crossref] Hill Collins, P. (1989). The social construction of black feminist thought. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 14(4), 745–773. [Crossref] Hill Collins, P. (2008). Black feminist thought. Routledge. Hill Collins, P., & Bilge, S. (2016). Intersectionality. Polity Press. Horlick-Jones, T. (2005). On ‘risk work’: Professional discourse, accountability, and everyday action. Health, Risk & Society, 7(3), 293–307. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1080/​1369857050022982​0. [Crossref] Lash, S. (2003). Reflexivity as non-linearity. Theory, Culture & Society, 20(2), 49–57. [Crossref] Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2003). Is re-modernisation occurring—And if so, how to prove it? A commentary on Ulrich Beck. Theory, Culture & Society, 20(2), 35–48. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1177/​ 0263276403020002​002. [Crossref] Levitas, R. (2013). Discourses of risk and utopia. Journal of Architectural Education, 67(1), 122– 128. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1080/​10464883.​2013.​771532. [Crossref] Merton, R. K., & Barber, E. (1976). Sociological ambivalence. In R. K. Merton (Ed.), Sociological ambivalence and other essays (pp. 3–31). New York: Free Press. Phelan, P. (2003). Unmarked: The politics of performance. London: Routledge. [Crossref] Renn, O. (2008). Risk governance: Coping with uncertainty in a complex world (Earthscan Risk in Society). New York: Earthscan in Routledge. [Crossref] Smart, C. (1999). A history of ambivalence and conflict in the discursive construction of the ‘child victim’ of sexual abuse. Social & Legal Studies, 8(3), 391–409. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1177/​ 0964663999008003​06. [Crossref]

Stotz-Ingenlath, G. (2000). Epistemological aspects of Eugen Bleuler’s conception of Schizophrenia in 1911. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 3(2):153–159. [Crossref] Van der Tuin, I., & Dolphijn, R. (2010). The transversality of new materialism. Women: A Cultural Review, 21(2), 153–171. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1080/​09574042.​2010.​488377. [Crossref]

© The Author(s) 2020 K. Giritli Nygren et al., A Framework of Intersectional Risk Theory in the Age of Ambivalence, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33524-3_2

2. Conceptual Frames: Risk and Intersectionality Katarina Giritli Nygren1   , Anna Olofsson1   and Susanna Öhman1   (1) Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall and Östersund, Sweden

 

  Katarina Giritli Nygren (Corresponding author) Email: [email protected]   Anna Olofsson Email: [email protected]   Susanna Öhman Email: [email protected] Keywords Risk – Intersectionality – Feminism – Inequality

Introduction This chapter introduces the key concepts of the book: risk and intersectionality, and also includes a brief introduction of our own line of thinking, which we call a framework of ‘intersectional risk theory’. Intersectional risk theory should be seen as a theoretical framework or a conceptual apparatus for critical analyses of risk. It can be considered an approach that scholars can use or develop further in their search for a better understanding of the interrelations between risk and the distribution of power. The need of such a framework can be described like this:

Asking what it means for risk researchers to practise an intersectional approach highlights the implications and complications of translating theoretical concepts from one study object or discipline to another. Previous attempts to apply an intersectional approach in public health and social medicine show that these studies are seldom related to theories of the ways in which the lived experience of oppression cannot be separated into single issues of class, race and gender, or how it becomes intertwined with risks … With its basis in poststructuralist critiques of the subject as decentred and its focus on the imbrications of multiple, differentially significant social categories, intersectionality offers a vantage point in this respect but at the same time it requires a rethinking and redoing both of concepts and methods. (Olofsson et al. 2014, p. 10)

Risk, Uncertainty, and Power This book is not about risk per se or any particular kind of risk.1 We are not even particularly interested in what a risk is but rather in what might constitute a risk in particular socio-spatio-temporal contexts, or how risk is used to understand and govern life and society. Intersectional risk theory implies an ambivalent understanding of risk that eludes study because the definition, understanding, and management of risk are always filtered through socio-cultural norms and values. In fact, anything can be considered a risk; it all depends on how one analyses the particular danger or event (Ewald 1991, p. 199). This is not to say that harms and threats do not exist or can be ignored; rather, these events do not become risks until they are interpreted or coded in such terms (Hannah-Moffat and O’Malley 2007, p. 15). Exactly what is considered a risk is determined by the socio-spatial-temporal context, and new risks arise all the time whilst old ones disappear. Risk entails uncertainty, and how risk is defined will depend on normative understandings of events in the past, present, and future (see Becker 2014, pp. 133–134). Still, it seems possible to understand a particular risk in a given socio-spatial-temporal context in terms of how this particular risk is engaged—in other words, how it is understood, described, and used by different actors and in different societal

contexts. Furthermore, sometimes specific risks, such as health risks, materialise into illness, death, and destruction. As such, risk is both connected to social constructions and framing practices as well as materialised realities (see Beck 2009; cf. Renn 2008, p. 2). Thus, as risk implies an uncertain future, ‘real dangers’ are inextricable from ‘imagined concerns’ or fears, and moving back to the discussion of duality and dialectics, real versus constructed risk is an artificial distinction, just like the distinction between nature and culture (see Haraway 1991; Latour 1993), and with the embarkation into ambivalence we embrace the possibility of a hybridity of things and thoughts (Beck 1999, p. 146). This can be compared to some extent to a critical realist approach (Curran 2016), at least in so far that we do not reject an ontological status of objects and their ability to influence events and the social world, including social structures, cultural structures, and agents. Still, we foreground epistemology before ontology, but having an ambivalent point of departure, we consider both positions. Thus, to approach risk from an ambivalent perspective, grounded in a substantial body of feminist research and theory, has the advantage of embracing a multiplicity of perspectives and epistemologies. This implies that the concept of risk in intersectional risk theory is flexible in relation to any socio-spatial-temporal context and can be investigated using different perspectives. Common for all perspectives in this book is that risk and power intersect. Risk is entangled with the exercise of power, and the language of risk colonises everyday life as well as policy and governance. That is, risk is used to describe what are considered modern and new phenomena in a widening set of social institutions in Western societies. Although not all would agree that we live in a ‘risk society’, the unintended and unknown side effects of science, capitalism, and (neoliberal) ideology and the continued dominance of the Western world have made life less certain, installing risk as a new language that we increasingly use to make sense of the world around us (Beck 1992). Certainly, many governments, organisations, and individuals are more and more preoccupied with conceptualising, mitigating, and managing risk, which has become an organising principle in Europe and North America, both nationally and internationally. This preoccupation should

not be seen as a sign of increased danger or uncertainty but as an attempt to improve the control of institutions and of society at large through risk governance, or indeed risk colonisation, as an organising idea for decision-making in modernity (Rothstein et al. 2006). In this way, risk is embedded in governance both as a quantitative expansion of governance of risk in society and in a qualitative shift towards managing threats to governance organisations. Amongst other things, this means that the language and methods of risk analysis are increasingly used to manage an ever-widening range of societal issues at different levels, including threats to individuals and society’s health, economy, integrity, and safety (Rothstein 2007). Since risk means a desire for change and therefore requires action, to use the language of risk is to exercise power. In other words, identifying something as a risk or as risky implies that it should be prevented, mitigated, or at least managed: ‘Once called into existence, a risk has the potential to reshape how we know and act’ (Baker and Simon 2002, p. 171). Thus, risk is normative since it presents something that is possible to happen, often undesirable (see Douglas 2002). In addition, uncertainty—the ever-present companion of risk— invites the anticipation of certain risks in the future (Beck 2009). This future orientation paves the way for an expansion of risk definition beyond the limited field of risk analysis. In effect, what might happen in the future is limited only by our imagination. This serves the dual purpose of pre-empting an uncertain future and regulating the present within the ideologies and norms of those with the power to define what and who is ‘at risk’ or ‘risky’ in that imagined future. This marks a shift from the traditional risk analysis paradigm, which defined risk as the probability of certain adverse outcomes, based on historical facts or other calculations. In certain policy areas, this has been replaced by the analysis of possible future risks, based on imagined scenarios (Linnell 2019). In her work on migration, border control, and terrorism, Amoore (2013) shows how, in the face of uncertainty, this pre-empting of the future by imagining the ‘possible’ rather than the ‘probable’ can regulate people’s actions and resources through risk management and ‘securitisation’, transcending national laws and ethics. Following Mary Douglas (2002), we argue that the preoccupation with risk and danger is also a means of creating community and social

cohesion. To speak of risk is related to the exercise of power, as this kind of talk seeks to influence perceptions, behaviours, and policies, based on particular interests, ideologies, and norms. Risk is inseparable from power, justice, and legitimacy and is, in consequence, politicised in terms of liability (or blame) and consent (Douglas 2002): In everyday life, parents use the language of risk to influence their children in statements such as ‘don’t speak to strangers’, ‘don’t eat that much sugar’, or ‘look carefully on both sides before crossing the street’. Similarly, a politician may reframe migration as the ‘refugee crisis’ in a bid to influence people’s attitudes, paving the way for regulatory changes or proposals to build a wall to exclude people who are fleeing oppression or simply trying to earn a living. As a theoretical concept, risk is also seductive in the context of a globalising society, as iconic risks such as climate change and nuclear power are systemic and global; the question is whether risk is a global organising principle or whether Western societies are in a state of delusion. Seen as a master narrative (Latour 2003), the security of the welfare state has made societies more sensitive to risk than in earlier periods, when the need for safety was not taken for granted, thus engendering a risk paradigm through which these societies understand themselves, other societies, and global institutions. The theoretical assumption that risk as a concept permeates everything from everyday life and institutions to nation-states and global organisations may simply be another example of the hegemonic status of Western research, which often neglects the possibility of looking beyond where one stands (cf. Beck 2002). What we find interesting, and what this book brings to risk theory, is that although many before us have addressed the entanglement of risk and power, relatively few theorists have explored how this manifests as inequality. Despite increased research interests in the gendered nature of victimisation, sexual violence, and illness, for example, theoretical engagements with insights from feminist philosophy are rare. In contemporary, neoliberal, and individualised societies, the individual is often perceived as responsible for their own and society’s successes or failures, even though some are exposed to greater difficulties than others because of their gender, class, or race. Similarly, whilst natural hazards are seen as ‘non-discriminating’ and are both global and generic (Beck 19922), it is by now well known that

beyond material devastation, such events expose the underlying social structures where gender, race, and class intersect repeatedly to privilege some and victimise others, as in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Belkhir and Charlemaine 2007).

Theoretical Approaches to Risk and Inequality Looking at some of the existing work on risk and inequality, Mary Douglas stands out as one of the first scholars who drew attention to this relationship. She argued that culture determines how inequality is dealt with in society at large or in particular institutions: Cultural analysis is a countervailing vision which warns what categories in each kind of culture are most likely to be at-risk, who will be sinned against, and who will be counted as the sinner exposing the others to risk. … What is not true is that the same speculations are found in all cultures. In an individualist culture, the weak are going to carry the blame for what happens to them; in hierarchy, the deviants; in a sect, aliens and also faction leaders. (Douglas 1992, p. 36) Risk, or danger, maintains social order, for example by explaining misfortune and placing blame according to social categorisations. Risk demands an explanation, initiating a process of assigning responsibility and blame—the forensic method, the way negative events are linked to blame. According to Douglas (1992), the allocation of responsibility is a strategy for protecting the values in a particular cultural group. In her early studies she investigated how the concepts ‘taboo’, ‘sin’, and ‘pollution’ work to control individuals and structure society through the forensic model of placing responsibility of misfortune. In industrial societies, risk plays a similar role as taboo and explanations that refer to taboo have an inherent social dimension, separating individuals or groups into categories such as victims and culprits and so supporting the social order of gender divisions, social hierarchies, labour, and power relations by suppressing actions that might prove disruptive. As a mechanism for social categorisation and division, risk and taboo serve the same structural function (although individualised risk can be managed whilst taboo cannot) (Boholm 2015, p. 75). Cultural theory

provides a situated account of risk—for example, how we live with risk in everyday life—and of how this understanding may differ from the probabilistic judgements of experts (Boholm 2015, p. 74; HannahMoffat and O’Malley 2007, p. 21). A more recent example of the theorisation of risk and inequality comes from Dean Curran who, in his book Risk, Power and Inequality in the 21st century (2016), develops and also criticises the risk society hypothesis whilst developing a theory about risk and inequality. Proposing a class analysis of risk positions, he argues that cultural theory, governmentality, and systems theory neglect systemic change and how the production and distribution of risk affects inequality. Although he makes an important point, Curran acknowledges other socio-structural variables but develops his argument by continually neglecting other key socio-structural variables. He is strictly a class analysis that omits issues of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and other lines of difference. Distancing himself from poststructural and governmental approaches, the focus on class is motivated by the critique of Beck’s standpoint, who argued that class is dead and has been replaced by risk positions; although Beck later nuances his standpoint and develops his thoughts in terms of individualisation processes that uncouple class culture from class position, leading to enhanced social inequalities and loss of class identify, both Beck and his critics focus on class divisions rather than on other aspects of inequality (Atkinson 2007; Beck 2007). However, Curran’s (2016) theoritisation of structural inequalities as a way to extend the risk society framework not only distances itself from poststructuralism but also fails to draw on the insights of feminist theory. He finds his theoretical inspiration in the sociological canon. Curran’s own understanding of class is relational, meaning that one class can only achieve a privileged position by the subordination of another; thus, it is not the privileged who take the risk and consumes the ‘bad’—or as Connell (2004) pointed out, the privileges of some, like ourselves, are made possible by the work of other people who are mostly less privileged, including those engaged in unpaid labour. Building on Beck’s early claim that risk is an object of distribution comparable to the distribution of wealth, creating risk positions and class positions, respectively, Curran contends (2016, p. 12) that ‘the study of the intersection between class position and risk position needs

to be investigated if key, currently neglected, bases of contemporary widening inequalities are to be identified’. Rather than arguing whether class is reproduced or varying, Curran posits that risk intensifies class differences and, therefore, inequality. From a materialist perspective, we agree that this is an important point, as is Curran’s rejection of Beck’s early totalisation view of risk, that is, that risk is the driving force in society (Beck 1992). He flips the discussion about resources and talks of the risk and inequality nexus, where risk intensifies class differences, and argues that there is a systemic process structuring contemporary power relations resulting from the distribution of ‘bads’. Even though Curran acknowledges gender as a category along with which power is distributed unequally, he argues that it is the intersection between risk and class that needs to be in the foreground in order to identify the widening gaps of inequality in contemporary society. It is true also for intersectional analysis that some category of inequality is usually in the foreground—gender or, as in this case, class —but as already mentioned, poststructural thinking, including feminist theory, is more or less rejected by Curran. Accordingly, the multidimensional effects of individuals’ lived experiences (Crenshaw 1989, p. 139) and the processes by which risk-based policies and institutional networks perpetuate inequality in complex ways (see Choo and Ferree 2010) remain underdeveloped in such a system of thinking. Consequently, there are significant gaps in our understanding of how social inequality is reproduced and how the nature of risk has been transformed in recent decades. Rather than rejecting fields of research that have the potential to increase our knowledge about the contemporary, we find it important to consider and learn from various perspectives and not close any doors because of differences in epistemological and ontological points of view. Therefore, we want to mention another scholar engaged in the relationship between hazards and inequality: Sylvia Walby. Walby has developed an intersectional approach to crisis and inequality, but also strongly disagrees with feminist poststructural theories (Walby 2001). She noticed that risk is an inevitable part of modern societies and that a masculine culture of risk-taking intersects with certain crises (Walby 2015). Just like Curran, Walby has worked with a theoretical framework that does not relativise social categories or conflate one line of

difference into another. She finds in systems theory, and above all complexity theory, her way of theorising intersecting inequality. Inspired by Yuval-Davis’ earlier work (2006), she argues that the ontological basis of each of the social categories is autonomous and cannot be reduced to, for example, the economic sphere, but can coexist in different spheres, or systems: These systems of social relations are constituted at different levels of abstraction; one level is emergent from another. An individual will participate with a number of different sets of social relations. These are overlapping, non-saturating and nonnested systems of social relations. Gender is not contained within class relations; they are not nested. Gender relations are a separate system; it overlaps with class, but neither gender nor class fully saturate the institutional domains. (Walby 2007, p. 460) Walby contends that the concept of a system represents social interconnections in the widest terms. According to her, it equals scholars theorising social relations, regimes, networks, fields, institutions, domains, and discourses, and that all these concepts could just as well use the concept of systems. Walby distinguishes between two sets of systems, institutionalised domains (economy, polity, violence, and civil society) and groups of social relations (e.g. gender, class, and race), where each system has its own spatial and temporal reach that makes it possible for different social relations to intersect in various domains (Walby 2007). However, even though gender is at the forefront in her analyses of the financial crisis in the late 2000s and despite the fact that Walby (2015) argues that gender was, and still is, the axis of that crisis, she also takes an explicit stance against feminist theory, particularly standpoint and poststructural feminist theory (Walby 2001). She calls into question the feminist retreat from modernism, rationalism, and scientific methods. Thus, both Walby and Curran distance themselves from gender studies, which confirms the established lines of difference in sociology and social science more broadly. Instead, we find a more profound link between risk, inequality, and gender studies amongst theorists engaging in governmentality-

inspired research. This should not surprise us, since Foucault has inspired much of both risk and gender research with his focus on power and governance. In the following chapters, we will return to scholars who engage in the intersections of risk and power from this perspective, not least to Kelly Hannah-Moffat, who was one of the first to introduce intersectionality to risk research, and her partners. However, at this point it is pertinent to mention that in 2007, Kelly Hannah-Moffat and Pat O’Malley published the first edited volume about gender and risk, encouraging feminist and risk scholars to ignore the dividing lines between risk society, governmentality, and cultural theory and to focus instead on how these can be seen as complementary (Hannah-Moffat and O’Malley 2007, p. 25). They stress the conceptual importance of simultaneously and interconnected inequalities in understanding the risk–gender nexus, as risk is shaped by, interacts with, and (re)produces various configurations of inequality. Hannah-Moffat and O’Malley (2007) further acknowledge feminist research and how gender is integrally linked to race, class, and other inequalities: gender and risk are mutually constitutive. Gendered knowledges, norms and hierarchies are linked with understandings of what constitutes a risk; the tolerance level of risk; the extent to which risk consciousness will be accepted or denied in public discourse or self-image; and whether risks are to be avoided and feared, regarded as just one of the costs of a certain lifestyle, or even valued as an experience and valorised as an opportunity for displays of courage and strength … Despite the apparent obviousness of risk/gender nexus, research on risk has often proceeded as if it can be understood without clear reference to gender. (Hannah-Moffat and O’Malley 2007, pp. 5, 6) Our position is similar but is based on a feminist knowledge position of ambivalence beyond the dilemmas of uncertainty, disorder, and undecidability, arguing instead for ambivalence in such distinctions as structure versus agency and conflict versus consensus. Whilst key social theories of risk (e.g. risk society, cultural symbolism,

governmentality, and voluntary risk-taking/edge work) have made important contributions to the understanding of risk, we strive for an eclectic and ambivalent position, drawing on those contributions that we find relevant and criticising or ignoring others. Despite the emergence of new approaches to understanding risk, such as relational risk theory (Hilgartner 1992; Boholm and Corvellec 2011) and inbetween strategies (Zinn 2008), there is currently a need to contrast and reconcile these theories with feminist perspectives that apply class, race, gender, and their intersections, to risk theory (and vice versa). This need exists, as we have argued already, because risk has been theorised almost exclusively from a modernisation perspective, embodying the idea of a single Western modernity (Brown 2015). Often taking the form of a dichotomy (e.g. individualism–collectivism, structure–agency, and conflict–consensus), fundamental concepts rooted in the time-space of Europe during the Enlightenment have been dispersed hegemonically across the world. Even though governmentality, risk society, and different in-between theories have aimed to find ways of developing or even overcoming dichotomy thinking and the heritage of the Enlightenment in their theorisation of risk, they do not put the relationship between risk and the multiplicity of inequality at the centre of their work. What is needed, then, is a theory that can simultaneously embrace and question risk whilst problematising both its practical consequences and theoretical implications. However, before we turn to intersectional risk theory, the concept of intersectionality needs to be explained in full.

Intersectionality: Moving Concepts Across Fields Coined by lawyer and scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, the term intersectionality informed critical race studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s—a movement born of a determination to problematise the law’s purported colour-blindness, neutrality, and objectivity (Crenshaw 1989; Cho et al. 2013). From the outset, intersectionality has been of interest at one locus in particular: the intersection of race and gender. Different approaches to intersectional research share the common

premise that society entails multiple systems of social stratification that interlock to form a ‘matrix of domination’ (Andersen and Hill Collins 2007). In other words, every individual holds a position in different systems simultaneously (e.g. as both oppressed and oppressor); one’s exact position in the matrix of domination influences one’s worldview and life chances in a way that differs from the impact of any single form of stratification. It is commonly stressed that combinations of subordinate categories are not ‘additive’ but ‘multiple’, and that the combination of group affiliations can mean very different things, depending on time and place. Today, the concept of intersectionality has migrated far from its origins and is used in diverse ways in different contexts. Leslie McCall characterises intersectionality as ‘the most important theoretical contribution that women’s studies, in conjunction with related fields, have made so far’ (McCall 2005, p. 1771). At a theoretical level, it has contributed to a growing multidisciplinary approach to the analysis of subjects’ experiences of identity and oppression, and numerous feminist overviews offer thick descriptions of the concept’s origins and the variations in how it has been understood and applied (Cho et al. 2013; McCall 2005; Prins 2006; Hancock 2007; Lutz et al. 2011). Asking what it means for sociologists to practise intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological approach to inequality, Yeon Choo and Marx Ferree (2010) emphasise three dimensions of theorising: the importance of including the perspectives of multiply marginalised people; an analytical shift beyond the enumeration and addition of race, class, gender, and other types of social subordination as separate factors into the analysis of their interactions; and a willingness to see multiple institutions as overlapping (cf. McCall 2005). It is also important to incorporate the analysis of unmarked categories and the ways in which power and privilege are constituted. Portraying intersectionality in a similar fashion, McCall (2005) argues that this method limits the range of methodological approaches that can be used, given the complexity arising when the subject of analysis eludes simple categorisation or single-dimensional analysis. In McCall’s view (2005), this also restricts the kinds of knowledge that can be produced, given the preference for qualitative methodologies and the avoidance or rejection of quantitative methodologies because of their often

reductionist design. Focusing on how categories are managed and used to explore the full complexity of intersectionality in society, McCall identifies three approaches to categories and complexity: anticategorical complexity, intracategorical complexity, and intercategorical complexity. The first two deconstruct analytical categories and question the use of quantifiable variables, on the basis that categories are reductionist and fail to capture the complexity of intersecting power relations. Most existing intersectional research has adopted one of these two approaches, whilst relatively few studies are intercategorical. This third approach acknowledges that there are relationships of inequality between social groups and takes those relationships as the starting point for analysis (McCall 2001, 2005). This shifts the focus from the definition of the categories or groups to the relationships between categories or social groups. Choo and Ferree’s (2010) concerns extend beyond methodology; they also distinguish three ways of understanding intersectionality, as groupcentred, process-centred, or system-centred. In their view, most empirical intersectional studies are group-centred, looking at multiply marginalised groups and their perspectives and theorising the ways in which lived experience of oppression cannot be understood in terms of discrete issues of class, race, and gender. This approach is closely related to standpoint theory, which is associated with projects that relate to giving voice, focusing in particular on differences between experiences within a given category, rendering them comparable to what McCall (2005) refers to as intracategorical analyses. The process-centred style views intersectionality as a process and power as relational, with a particular emphasis on how the interactions between variables multiply oppression. This approach is sometimes used in comparative multilevel analyses and is also associated with attempts to draw attention to ‘unmarked’ groups, making it similar to what McCall frames as intercategorical analysis. The third, systemcentred form views intersectionality as a complex system where gender and race are seen to be embedded in a framework of global capitalism (the organisation of ownership and profit and the commoditisation of labour) and seeks to identify local and historically particular regimes of inequality. This approach is also associated with comparative and historical perspectives.

Given the many ways of understanding intersectionality, it is important to define our own standpoint. The reference to intersectionality in the title of this book is not an attempt simply to appropriate the concept or to claim it as a new theory. Instead, we wish to acknowledge and apply the knowledge and concepts produced within gender studies by developing what we call intersectional risk theory. We believe that everyday understanding, practices, and discourses of risk can be grasped better by taking intersectional theory as a point of departure. Opening ambivalent perspectives on contradictory realities and oblique knowledge relations, this relational view interrogates claimed positions and how these relate to other positions, in particular, time-place settings. We also apply this approach in our relation to intersectional theory and emphasise some concepts, such as multiple and intersecting positions, more than others, such as multiple and intersecting identities. In pursuing this critical analysis, intersectionality demonstrates the ambivalence and multiplicity of structure as well as agency, and in the use of risk in making new understandings possible, it is free of the institutionalised conceptual frameworks of modernisation theories.

Intersectional Risk Theory and the Doing of Risk The key argument of intersectional risk theory is that risks are performative and are always co-articulated with norms and discourses, which, in turn, impact how (in)equalities are and can be performed or ‘done’. One way that we have previously worked to create an intersectional approach to risk has been through the introduction of ‘doing risk’, as an angle that echoes the ‘doing gender’ of gender studies (Fenstermaker and West 2002). Gender, then, is not a fixed category but a dynamic construct describing social power relationships in specific historical circumstances, shaping people’s lives in fundamental and often contradictory ways, and giving rise to conflict as well as change (Connell 2009), itself interwoven with the creation of power relationships such as ethnicity, generation, and class (De los Reyes and Mulinari 2005). In this view, risk is done in conjunction with structures

of power—that is, the doing of risk is also the doing of gender, class, race, and so on. It is a mutually constitutive relationship between risk and these social positions, each complex, multiple, and interrelated. In this sense, risk can be seen as a societal organising principle, with the power to change individual attitudes and behaviours, as well as organisations and nations, some of which act at an international level and contribute to risk colonisation on a global scale—or a ‘world risk society’ (Beck 2009). In trying to engage theoretically across different fields, we need to grasp how meanings may shift when concepts migrate. With our work, we hope to track what happens to the concepts of risk and intersectionality whilst exploring how this kind of risk theorising is activated from different perspectives, such as structure and agency. Proceeding from intersectional theory, we believe that everyday ideas, practices, and discourses related to risk can be explored and understood more fully. Many have already argued that risk research must go beyond modernisation theories and embrace reflexive or ambivalent understandings of risk and society (cf. Beck 2002). Furthermore, the notion that individual actors and societies or structures fit together in a straightforward manner must be problematised. However, this cannot be accomplished by an exclusive emphasis on either the freedom of individual actors or structural determination (O’Malley 2009). Instead, as mentioned at the outset of this chapter, our ambition is to engage theoretically with ideas that embrace ambivalence and inconstancy, structure, and agency. By extension, risk cannot be captured by a set of rigid categories but is constructed and (re)produced in power relationships; doing risk is closely linked to the processes by which norms of gender, ethnicity, and class are socially and performatively inscribed in language, minds, and bodies (Butler 2009a, b). To better explore the doing and undoing (or, following Butler [1993], the performance) of risk in social discourses and practices, we will study that performance in the context of power, referring to practices that simultaneously (re)produce and conceal the socio-political norms and positions played out in contemporary hierarchical power and knowledge relations (see Hannah-Moffat and O’Malley 2007; Rose 2008). An example of how risk discourse can conceal racist ideology and thus risk performed in conjunction with

racism is the development of a risk discourse framing immigration as a risk to nation-states and local communities. For example, during the refugee situation in 2015 the dominant discourse of immigration in Sweden moved from vulnerability amongst the migrants to vulnerability of the country. Our principal rationale for engaging with the performative aspects of risk is to create a space in which to theoretically rethink the handling of risks and the ways in which such handling intersects with, for instance, class, race, gender, and sexuality, paving the way for both construction and deconstruction in keeping with the intersectional approach. The next chapter is the first of five chapters where we investigate the relationship between risk and inequality from different intersectional perspectives in a step-by-step manner. We begin with social structure and how we can understand this relationship better from a system-centred perspective, for example by incorporating gender regimes in risk governance. We then in the following four chapters move towards group processes and the role of actors and agency in risk and inequality.

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Footnotes 1 In Chap. 1 we defined our positions in terms of the sociology of risk and uncertainty, feminist and critical studies, and it is from these domains, primarily, that we understand, discuss and write about risk. Research in, for example, the field of risk analysis or risk management is only

relevant in this book as examples of the role of risk in societies and not as theoretical or empirical inspiration.

 

2 Beck (1992) acknowledges the fact that hazards strike unevenly both globally and across populations, but the main argument in this first book on risk society is still that risk, or rather mega-risks, overrides these inequalities. See also later Beck (e.g. 2007, 2009).

 

© The Author(s) 2020 K. Giritli Nygren et al., A Framework of Intersectional Risk Theory in the Age of Ambivalence, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33524-3_3

3. Risk, Inequality, and (Post) Structure: Risk as Governing Katarina Giritli Nygren1   , Anna Olofsson1   and Susanna Öhman1   (1) Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall and Östersund, Sweden

 

  Katarina Giritli Nygren (Corresponding author) Email: [email protected]   Anna Olofsson Email: [email protected]   Susanna Öhman Email: [email protected] Keywords Risk – Intersectionality – Governance – Regimes – Governmentality

Introduction What has occupied theorists for centuries is how societal transformation or change is (theoretically) possible when the subject is either depicted as merely a vessel coerced by an all-encompassing and pre-existing structure, or simply left out of the analysis. However, this simplistic caricature of structuralism is now dated. We believe that there are notions of structural approaches important for an intersectional understanding of risk and the hegemonic structures of inequality. In this chapter, we will illustrate how the interplay between risk and inequality can be understood as structural processes, where

stratified social relations, represented by collective habits, legal rules, regulations, and policy, make cohesion and the reproduction of sociocultural systems possible. We will review theories focusing on how risk and inequality can be understood and conceptualised in terms of rules and resources, and how these social structures materialise in stratified governance and regulating regimes, particularly drawing on poststructural theorising. Current theories on the relationship between governing regimes and social structures in relation to risk lack clarity and depth when it comes to issues of inequality, particularly in relation to gender and how gender intersects with other social categories such as class, race, and sexuality. Therefore, we will bring in the conceptualisation of gender regimes and intersectionality, with its focus on the imbrications of multiple, differentially significant social categories, as core analytical tools to elaborate the understandings of risk as a governing principle of societies. So, where do we find research that engages with structural inequality and risk? One answer is that governmentality might be the theoretical perspective that has inspired a major part of the theoretical elaborations of risk, power, and inequality. One very good example of this, and where intersectional perspectives are also included, is the 2007 book Gendered Risks, edited by Kelly Hannah-Moffat and Pat O’Malley and with contributions from a number of distinguished scholars that critically discuss many of the core issues of risk research. This is a cornerstone in critical risk research and we would now like to quote Hannah-Moffat and O’Malley (2007, p. 1) in their depiction of risk regimes, the main theme of this chapter: In many ways we are intruded upon and disciplined by risk regimes that mean to protect us from future harms, and if we fail to buy in, we must suffer the consequences. If, for example, we fail to take precautions against ‘crime risks’ we may be labelled victims of our own carelessness; if we smoke and develop lung cancer, blame is clear because the risks are known. We often participate willingly in these regimes of risk because they promise, and often deliver; greater safety and security. Yet we buy in at a cost: we allow much of our daily lives to be delimited by considerations of risk that take into account futures that are

unlikely to happen to the average person. Still, this defensive and negative side is only one aspect of the development of risk. An array of ‘positive’ and ‘productive’ risks has been made salient and available. Pension plans may now be linked with share market portfolios so that we can select the ‘level of risk’ that suits us; gambling has become a ‘leisure industry’ valued for the employment it creates and the tax revenues it generates; and extreme sports are becoming a popularized form of recreation through which we can fulfil ourselves rather than merely demonstrate foolhardiness. (Hannah-Moffat and O’Malley 2007, p. 1) As illustrated by the quote above, governmentality is not the only aspect that is pertinent here. There are also examples in the theoretical understandings of risk from a systems perspective and risk society that deal with unequal distributions of power (Hannah-Moffat and O’Malley 2007). We will specifically deal with how our theoretical understandings of how societies are governed, kept together, and how transformation is possible over time, relate to the current structural or systemic theories of risk. The aims, practices, and knowledge base that underpin risk governance (the composition of the governing, its consequences, and the executing bodies) are always gendered, classed, and racialised (see also Walby 2009). This is not just a matter of individual positioning, but of socio-structural differences that are manufactured through the use of particular framing devices, including the governance of risk. In fact, inequalities are produced by modes of governance, including the use of ‘risk’ as a regulatory regime, and shaped by intersectional power (im)balances. In order to make an intersectional risk perspective work here, the concept of ‘regime’ is a key enabler, not least since regime as a theoretical concept is found both in risk and gender theory. In the following section we will take a closer look at how intersectional analysis can enhance our understanding of how risk and inequality are mutually constitutive in governmental expressions of power. First, we will return to Foucault’s work on regime and security as modes of governance, which inspired both ourselves and many other gender and risk scholars. Then, we will focus on risk regimes and argue that

‘regime’ is a useful concept to take into consideration whilst trying to mediate between the different theoretical strands such as those of Marxism, poststructuralism, and feminism, whilst thinking of risk as a governing principle. Even though regimes might be identified slightly differently by different authors, considering regimes directs our analysis towards the institutional complexes that coordinate the everyday work of administration and the lives of those subject to administrative regimes, encompassing not only state and economy but also academic, professional, and bureaucratic knowledge and associated practices. The chapter ends with a concluding section where the concept of ambivalence is brought into the discussion on intersectional risk regimes: a complex blend of practices and discourses that provide direction and regulation, are objectified and impersonal, that claim universality, and that display a specific interrelation between gendered, racialised, and classed forms.

The Governmentality of Risk and Security— Attending to the Concept of Regime Foucault (1980, p. 131) stated: ‘Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth—that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true.’ The concept of ‘regime’ that Foucault used could be described as a kind of system of procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and functioning of statements, linked ‘by a circular relation to systems of power which produce it and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which redirect it’ (Foucault [1976] 1990, pp. 112–114). In other words, it is about the ways in which things are made to appear, how they come to be represented, and how the relationship between things and words is formulated. Mapping the genealogy of the liberal society and its regime of truth, Foucault suggests that by the end of the eighteenth century ‘the economy’ was naturalised as an entity of its own, a natural order governed by its own laws (such as the law of supply and demand), which governments could not avoid taking into account. Similarly, risk can be described as the internal psychological and cultural correlative of liberalism. Risk calculation becomes central to

neoliberal governance where the divides between the public and the private, or the governed and the government, constitute constructed spaces by which individuals can be secure in relation to their juridically assured rights, or as Foucault says, ‘the cost of producing freedom becomes security’ (Foucault 2008, pp. 65–67). The governmentality perspective on risk, building on the work of Foucault, questioned dominant, top-down power concepts (for example, Dean 1999; O’Malley 2004; Rose 1999). Power was conceptualised as increasingly exercised indirectly through discourses and calculative technologies. Actuarial risk and its embedded presence in power discourses became a key element in understanding how the generation of knowledge and dominant discourses integrates with the exercise of power. According to Foucault (2007), the central logic of power is the security logic, which, contrary to juridical and disciplinary logic that seek to control particular territories and individual subjects, aims at governing and controlling populations by means of measuring methods, epidemiology, and so forth, or as Foucault (1978, p. 43) expressed it, is ‘what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculation and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life’. In the logic of security, populations are understood in terms of certain quantifiable factors, and thus to have their own characteristic rates of birth, death, increase, and decline, which can be ‘discovered’ through the use of statistical measures. Over time, population characteristics like these have come to be taken for granted as ‘real’ entities subject to the expertise of economists, sociologists, and demographers. In such governmental work, attention is therefore paid to the ways in which the increasingly prevalent adoption of risk as a framework of government, or a technology of power, creates new subjectivities and redefines relationships. By means of statistics, the desired, or even ideal, citizen is formulated in terms of, for example, health and education according to which policy is adopted. To govern populations through the logic of security puts the future into the present in terms of possible (negative) events inflicting the process of governing, and this pre-emption of the future (e.g. De Goede 2008) makes things that are yet to come seemingly calculable and thus manageable. To be able to know what should and should not be managed, one has to decide what the desirable or optimal and the

acceptable limits are, which cannot be exceeded (Foucault 2007). The power lies in defining social and other phenomena as a risk, or as risky, thus making them governable, no matter that this definition is made out of ideology, qualified guesses, or statistical calculations (Belina and Miggelbrink 2013, p. 127). For instance, after 9/11 the ‘calculus of risk’ changed (Amoore and de Goede 2008) and risk analysis became even more oriented towards an uncertain future by shifting from probability analyses of historical patterns to scenarios pre-empting the future through the imagination of the possible rather than the probable (Massumi 2015). These kinds of risk or security regimes are often enabled after dramatic events like this. Similarly, during the autumn of 2015, when an unexpected number of people applied for asylum in Sweden, this was framed as a ‘refugee crisis’ and the pure number of asylum seekers conceived as a risk towards the Swedish system is an event that gave rise to more restrictive migration policies (Danielsson et al. 2019). Dramatic and unexpected events can thus facilitate the impact of threats and open up the introduction of new laws and reforms. However, the background to a change in regulation is usually a process that has been going on for a while. In her analysis of the process that took place in Russia prior to the war in Chechnya, Wilhelmsen (2017) shows how the interaction between public debate and historical experiences enabled a certain type of threat scenario that created a change of attitudes relatively quickly and led to a general acceptance of the decision to start a war which previously had been seen as impossible and unacceptable. This phenomenon, known as securitisation, where particular issues such as immigration are described in terms of risks rather than humanitarianism or economy, is intimately associated with nationalism and the development of rightwing extremism (Aradau 2015). Biometrics and the capacity to store and manage ‘big data’ through algorithms have revolutionised surveillance just as digitalisation has revolutionised society. Previous surveillance practices were directed towards the control of individuals suspected of, for example, crimes, whilst new surveillance tends to screen entire populations; people can be classified according to schemes of suspicion based on income, attributes, habits, preferences, or offences in order to be influenced, managed, or controlled (Lyon 2003). Amoore (2011, p. 2014) has even argued that who we actually

are is irrelevant to the contingent biographies that make up the underlying data. Moreover, the ‘container’ logic that the global society is exclusively organised in terms of nation-states and their authoritative power over the population has been questioned and, instead, multilevel (e.g. international, national, regional, and local) and transboundary governance (transgressing certain boundaries and creating others) is suggested, particularly in the field of risk. This means that ‘population’ is a matter for defining boundaries—who is to be part of a particular population, and who is not—and if we want to understand how such a regime of truth produces inequalities we need to incorporate an intersectional perspective. A brief example illustrates this well. The conflict in Syria and Iraq in the 2010s where state forces were pitted against the emergent ISIS group (fighting for an ‘Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’) rekindled debates about the social origins of participant British-born Jihadists in that conflict (Olofsson et al. 2014). These debates, not for the first time, revealed the fallacy of the dominant social discourse which defined materially deprived, marginalised male youths as those primarily at risk of Islamic radicalisation (Amoore and de Goede 2008). The realisation that these fighters often came from middle-class, highly educated backgrounds and increasingly included women as well as men cast the debate in a new light. This has also exposed a conceptual vacuum as social commentators struggle to analyse and understand this new social risk. However, the point in governmentality research is not to evaluate whether risk-based procedures are accurate or fair, but rather to identify and analyse the specific characteristics of this way of governing uncertain future events (Rose 2000; Simon 1988). Although the power and the mechanisms of government are central to understandings of risk from governance perspectives, we only see a rudimentary understanding of the nature of the reproduction of social inequalities in terms of gender, class, race, and sexuality within these theoretical frameworks (Hannah-Moffat and Lynch 2012; Hannah-Moffat and O’Malley 2007).

Risk Regulation Regimes and Gender Regimes

Risk regulation regimes , and how risk analysis has become institutionalised, is more or less common sense in organisational and policy risk research today. Risk regulation regimes are depicted as state regulatory institutions associated with the regulation of risks (Rothstein et al. 2006). As many, such as Luhmann (1993), have pointed out before us, risk provides an organising principle under uncertainty, because when something—an event, a matter, or problem—is defined as a risk it becomes controllable through the process of risk calculation. Therefore, both old and new problems in ever more areas of organised life start to be constructed in terms of probabilities and damage. For example, unemployment used to be a concern from a social equality and livelihood perspective in Sweden—everyone should have the right to work to be able to support themselves, but now, unemployment tends to be framed as a risk for particular ‘at-risk’ population subgroups who with the right incentives can be managed, and the risk reduced. Risk transforms a society from one which is dictated by faith and fatalism into a society of actors seemingly managing their own destiny (Rothstein et al. 2006). Thus, more and more of society tends to be organised in relation to risk, an organisation where governance and regulation become a kind of risk management (Lidskog et al. 2005). Central political issues are now related to the management, reduction, or legitimation of risks, rather than the production of welfare and, thus, the reduction or legitimation of inequality. This is a shift that Beck (1992) characterises as the distinction between the ‘conflict field’ of wealth production and the ‘conflict field’ of hazard production. However, it can also be seen as a transformation in which questions about the distribution of resources are concealed by risk regulation regimes. However, despite ample critique of the weak conceptualisation of social inequality in risk studies (Mythen 2004) and an increasing acknowledgement of the role of socio-structural factors in exposure to and experience of risk (Beck 2009), sociological theories of risk and intersectionality have more or less developed separately. One step towards integration is to introduce gender regimes to risk regulation regimes. ‘Gender regimes’ as a concept was initially developed by Raewyn Connell in the mid-1980s in her work on gender and power. She aimed to investigate the relationship between gender regimes,

power, and inequality. Gender regimes is a dynamic construct of social power relationships under specific historical circumstances, shaping people’s individual practices and lives in fundamental ways within institutional contexts and itself interwoven with the creation of other power relationships such as ethnicity, generation, and class (Connell 2002). Thus, the sexual division of labour in terms of the segregation of male and female workers, discrimination and unequal wages, the unequal distribution of power in organisations in terms of authority and control, hierarchies of states and business, sexual regulations and institutional and interpersonal violence, and last but not least the (sexualised) emotional relationships between women and men (Connell 1987). The concept of gender regime describes how gender relations are organised in special interaction patterns, which reflect the social structure. Gender regimes can thus be seen as a microcosm of society’s overall gender order. At lower levels of analysis and within various institutions such as family, school, and politics, gender regimes generally correspond to the overall gender order of society, but they may also diverge and be differently organised. In other words, the gender regime is not given in advance by the social structure, but can differ from the overall gender order for example because of institutionalised historical social practices. However, within a gender regime, there is a built-in inertia that preserves the nature of the relationship over time as it involves social practices and is part of institutional arrangements that affect what is perceived as possible to do and not to do. Risk regulation regimes are similar to the concept of gender regimes, in so far that they are defined as powerful organising structures of organisations and institutions but are more influenced by Foucault’s theorising of social institutions, regulations, and discourses. Context, that is, the type and level of risk to be regulated, the nature of public and media attention, lobbying and organised interest, influence the content, that is, the regulatory stance, organisational structure, operating conventions, and regulatory attitudes, of risk regimes (cf. Power 2007). Different domains of risk are regulated differently depending on the extent to which the risks are attributable to organisations or individuals, and whether they are voluntary, compulsory, natural, social, or human-made, high- or low-tech.

Furthermore, the organisation of risk regimes is largely determined by the laws and regulations that apply in specific cases, the spread of ideas, and their practical implementation (Hood et al. 2001). The latter includes attitudes towards various policies, trust in expert opinions, views on the risk itself, and the practical processes involved in any response. This means that both the regulatory content and organisation in terms of monitoring, managing, and executing bodies varies according to the risk domain. So-called human-created risks such as nuclear power, traffic dangers, and risks associated with emerging technologies (e.g. nanotechnology) are usually formally regulated and monitored by federal governments, whilst risks associated with natural causes such as accidental falls and suicides, which can mean the death of large numbers of people, are not. Risk regulation regimes also include self-regulatory regimes (Rothstein 2003) which are developed based on, for instance, recommendations where the unit of assessment is the individual and their behaviour. It can be the National Food Agency’s dietary recommendations for pregnant women concerning different foodstuffs and weight, or it can be mobile applications designed to monitor one’s exercise or eating in line with public recommendations. These recommendations become part of a dominant regime of self-regulation. Over time, regimes of risk regulation develop into risk colonisation (Rothstein et al. 2006). Risk colonisation means that risk shapes the evolution, characteristics, and dynamics of state governance through risk, and occurs when risk is institutionalised as an instrument of systems maintenance and regulations are conceived as a system for social control. Consequently, more and more people and activities are framed as being associated with risks and therefore need to be controlled and managed in an institutional context. This increase of control is in itself a basis for the colonisation of risk, or the identification of more issues as risk, and thus the need for more risk management. The institutionalisation of risk has led to both increased risk regulation or governance, and a tendency to prioritise institutional risk management over societal risk management, such as through managing unequal living conditions or racism in society. The reason for this is that it becomes more important to protect the institution, for instance the government, than solving social challenges (Rothstein et al.

2006). So, risk regulating regimes not only reproduce inequalities, for example by disproportionately distributing the bad to the subordinated classes, but they also produce inequalities via their entanglement with racialised, classed, and gendered truth regimes such as liberalism, capitalism, and colonialism. To illustrate this, the Swedish national campaign to make parents more aware of the risks of skin cancer could serve as an example (Regionala cancercentrum i samverkan). The pilot project ‘Sunda solvanor’ (Healthy sun habits) was initiated in 2014 by the Regional Cancer Center West to increase awareness of which parts of the day when it is ‘least dangerous’ to stay in the sun in Sweden. During the period 2014–2017, the project was launched in 15 of the country’s 20 regions and county councils. The project aimed to give nurses at childcare centres a tool to talk about sun habits with parents of young children and babies. A predominantly image-based set of material (refrigerator magnets and posters) with an easily understandable message of what healthy sun habits mean was distributed and used in waiting rooms and the like. By 2018, 104,000 refrigerator magnets and just over 4,500 posters had been distributed. According to the campaign, parents should make children up to the age of 16 years avoid the adverse impacts of sun exposure during summer between 11 am and 3 pm by always having them use sunscreen and wear long sleeves. This information was communicated through various channels, including providing refrigerator magnets to all parents at annual health checkups for young children. From a risk perspective, the reason for the campaign is that the number of the number of people suffering from skin cancer is currently increasing by about 5 percent per year in Sweden, although mortality has not increased to the same degree (NORDCAN). The issues are also controversial since there are also health risks associated with vitamin D deficiency, particularly among young children, and the exposure to sun radiation is positively associated with vitamin D. Most experts agree that a short period of exposure to sunlight during the middle of the day is sufficient for light-skinned people. Thus, there is a complex relationship between the composition of the skin, vitamin D production, and radiation originating from the sun, where skin colour seems to impact the ability to produce vitamin D from sun radiation (Webb et al. 2018). Without going too deeply into an analysis of this

complexity of materiality and social positions represented by cells, radiation, and race (we will return to the importance of analysing these kinds of relationships in Chap. 7), we can see how the subject worth protecting in the Swedish ‘Healthy sun habits’ campaign does not need to be defined, as if all Swedish kids have white skin and are sensitive to sun radiation, and all children have the same preconditions, no matter if it is access to sunscreen or production of vitamin D, then children who do not meet these taken-for-granted assumptions are simply left out. The context of the campaign—health centres—is often dominated by a gender regime representing many traditional gender roles and social hierarchies in terms of status differences between health professionals. The source of the information—nurses—are in this gender regime associated with giving care, both as a profession and through being women (Govender and Penn-Kekana 2008), and the receivers—parents—are subsumed into this regime as caregivers responsible for the wellbeing of their child. The campaign, which aims to change the behaviour of parents and in the long run the population at large, functions through a regime of care of the vulnerable, largely enacted by women as professionals and parents, where normative assumptions about the child become secondary in the regime of care. Thus, this risk regulation is ‘doing’ the ‘whiteness’ of the Swedish population, that is, taking the need for sun protection as the norm, and taking for granted that it is a matter of uniform priority for all (cf. Ahmed 1997). By introducing an intersectional risk theory, we can start to unpack the entanglement of, in this case, the communication of guidelines on risk exposure, regulation, care of others, age, and skin colour.

An Intersectional Approach to Risk Regulation Regimes Studies on risk regulation regimes very rarely include feminist research on gender regimes or intersectionality. In order to find thoughts that connect gender and risk regimes we have to turn to the sociology of sport, where Young (1993, 2012) outlines the ambivalent and complex role of violence in sport and its associations with masculinity by tracing norms of bravery and heroism to the military roots of certain sports, but also how mass media and other social institutions reproduce hegemonic masculinity in terms of risk-taking and daring. Critical to

what has become almost synonymous with risk-taking in the sociology of risk, that is edgework, Laurendeau (2008) introduced Connell’s (1987) gender regimes as an institutional, or risk cultural, grounded understanding of why people engage in high-risk sports, and how this engagement might vary according to gender, since risk and gender are always interwoven (cf. Butler 19931). This shows, together with our discussion in the previous section of this chapter, that gender regimes and risk regulation regimes work well together not least because of similar conceptualisations of the mechanisms that structure society, institutions, and our daily lives. However, risk research tends to leave out other powerful regimes in its analyses. Intersectional risk theory opens up possibilities for the analysis of gender regimes in risk regulation and strengthens the intersectional approach. Indeed, gender regimes include intersectional perspectives, although with gender at the forefront, but intersectional risk theory also brings the power of risk into this analysis. Previous intersectional studies on risk regulation clearly indicate the advantages of such developments. For example, Kelly HannahMoffat and Paula Maurutto’s research on crime control is a good example of how insights from intersectionality theory can be used to explore the linkages between inequality and risk regulation regimes. They show how legal cultures use and combine risk and welfare strategies, frequently in terms of ‘needs’ and ‘empowerment’, to manage what are defined as diverse risky and at-risk populations or what can also be defined as gendered, racialised, and classed populations. Their intersectional analyses particularly focus on indigenous female convicts and the criminal justice system. For example, in her study of ‘Prisons that empower’, Hannah-Moffat (2000) reveals how the concept of empowerment, for a long time associated with radical and alternative movements, has been adopted by the criminal system as a strategy in managing the needs of female and aboriginal prisoners. As a consequence, correctional programmes designed to support the needs of the prisoners related to, for example, substance abuse, shifted from therapy to self-change models where the responsibility also moved from the institution to the individual prisoner. In their studies, intersectionality is of particular value in disentangling the way inequalities are embedded in positivist risk regimes and in

destabilising categories and persons across time and space. For example, they show how parenthood can be judged as a sign of taking responsibility for males belonging to particular ethnic minorities, and thus the crime is explained by being the family breadwinner, whilst for women in the same situation and with a similar background, a felony is seen as a token of irresponsibility, considering the taken-for-granted responsibility of a mother towards the care of her child. Hannah-Moffat argues that particular understandings of women’s needs, for example as mother or victim, are reframed in risk regimes in terms of ‘problems’ and even as risks through the imposition of new risk-based decisionmaking templates that evoke particular masculine normative standards, stereotyped constructions of femininity and offending (Hannah-Moffat 1999). Hannah-Moffat was one of the first risk scholars to bring intersectional theory to risk research, and in our search for ways to incorporate theoretical concepts from feminist studies to the sociology of risk and uncertainty as a toolbox, that is, intersectional risk theory, Hannah-Moffat’s governmentality-inspired research is a good example of how intersectionality can be used to analyse gendered risk regulation regimes. Thus, she exposes the intersections of different structures of inequality in the justice system and how they interact with risk. The integration of intersectional analyses of risk allows for a clearer articulation of how risk logics can produce this disjuncture between subjects and their experiences. This case pertains to criminal justice, but the results can easily be transferred to other sectors that identify and target different types of populations—populations that are connected to a multitude of national norms, essentialist definitions, mischaracterised ‘differences’, and structural inequalities (Henne and Troshynski 2013). This shows how gendered understandings of risk result in broader gender-structured relations being either ignored or constructed as individual failures or inadequacies. Another key aspect of gender regimes that is important to include in an intersectional analysis of risk regulation regimes is the ways in which different regimes structure place (see McDowell 1999; Katz 2008; Pruitt 2008). This means that understandings of femininity and masculinity as well as accessible gender scripts are spatially expressed and embedded. When gender and space meet, a gendered spatial expression emerges (see Little and Morris 2005); exploring how this

spatial expression intersects with risk regulation regimes is a way to enhance the pursuit of understanding the intersections of risk and inequality. Examples of this is empirical work that makes use of approaches that try to combine place-based intersectional analysis of risk related to gender-based violence and poverty as key drivers of HIV infection (e.g. De Lange and Mitchell 2014; Mitchell et al. 2010) and the risk of partner violence as part of specific rural gender relations (e.g. Carrington and Scott 2008; DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2009). These studies indicate that risk and inequality are tied to a kind of placebased consciousness, based on a materialised analysis beyond discourse. Through this kind of ‘archaeological’ analysis, a layer of complexity is added to gendered risk regulation regimes. Another example of this is the study of the realities of immigrant and refugee girls and young women, which shows that the gendered regimes produce ‘the “exotic Other” as sexually available to the dominant culture’ (Jiwani 2005, p. 860). Stereotypes of a particular place, for example in terms of sexual exploitation and trafficking, make racialised girls and young women from these places more exposed to the risk of sexual harassment and sexual assault. Exploring the ways in which this spatial expression intersects with risk is fruitful, for example, in the pursuit of understanding ways to prevent violence. In intersectional theory, the often taken-for-granted identities are understood as, in fact, the product of multiple and multilayered axes of difference and the theory has the potential to add detail, and thus value, to the research on gendered risk regimes in complex and nuanced ways (Henne and Troshynski 2013). In our own analysis of a national policy programme, we explored what it means for social policy when risk starts to colonise governance, both on national and various other levels in society, and how current modes of governance tend to neglect the complexities of present-day life courses whilst using a gender-‘neutral’ approach, as if gender or any other power hierarchies no longer existed: ‘as if they did not still prop up the structures of power, inequality, and injustice; as if women’s and men’s positions in the labour market did not differ in Sweden; as if most women did not have jobs in the ailing public sector or men in the so-called market that is the private sector; as if women’s pay was not 80 per cent of men’s; as if the Swedish labour market were not racialised and so on’ (Fahlgren et al.

2016, p. 9). The identification of certain individuals as members of ‘atrisk’ groups without exploring or naming any of the structural forces that create such groups, often in direct comparison with others, is anyway connected to both implicit and explicit gender, racial, and class implications and may look like a game but is the work of a gender regime. Intersectional feminism, as we see it, is both a theoretical discipline and a commitment to political practice or activism in the quest for different and more equal societies, which, whilst recognising different locations and exploring privileges, emphasises social justice and the need for and the possibility of building solidarity and shared communities of struggle. Intersectional feminism challenges the binary opposition between theory and activism and offers pathways for activist scholarship. In the wake of risk colonialisation, we find the contribution of intersectional feminism, with its aim of social justice, more important than ever.

Bringing Ambivalence into the Structure of Inequality: Concluding Remarks We began this chapter by asking where we can find research that engages in structural inequality and risk. Governmentality is probably the theoretical perspective that has most inspired the theoretical explorations of risk and inequality and, as Walby (2007) points out, to talk about regulation and regimes is to put social structures at the forefront of the analysis. Following the discussions on epistemological ambivalence outlined in Chap. 1, we think that a genealogical questioning of the relationships between the self and society is important if we want to understand the mechanisms of risk governance and its relationship with inequalities. A tenet of this book is that structure and agency should not be seen as dichotomous—either-or—but should rather be viewed connected in a dynamic continuum of simultaneity to achieve theorisation of the intersection of multiple complex inequalities (Madhok et al. 2013). This brings us back to the need to find ways to combine different approaches, rather than stressing their incommensurability by pitting them against each other. As Walby (2007) emphasised, the challenge is

to include inequalities based on gender, class, race, sexuality, and so on, in the centre rather than on the margins of (risk) theory. This is also related to the ongoing debate on how to understand the cause of inequalities and their relationship with materialist versus discursive explanations. However, as mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, we believe that the current situation requires analyses that refuse to choose amongst different concerns. Instead, we want to highlight critical practices that link our understanding of global economic structures, nationalism, issues of race, and emergent patriarchies to both materialist and discursive analyses of risk. To understand the truth regimes behind hierarchies of gender, class, race, and sexuality, as well as places, the elementary structures of these hierarchies along with their intersections with risk regimes need to be explored. Therefore, not only the genealogy but also the archaeology of the relationship between these structures and risks must be analysed. This process is the work of a contemporary risk regulation regime that is entangled with processes of inequality; medication as well as sanitation, housing, and quality food are all differentially distributed across gender, class, and ethnicity. So too the determining factors of the likelihood of becoming infected with different illnesses and infections. We need to analyse and separate the regulation of risk from the discursive and spatial, using the knowledge of how regimes of gender intersect with various other relations of power. Risk governance, laced with the intersecting relations of power, can be said to keep communities and societies together, by producing and reproducing social categorisations. However, it goes beyond just regulation and coercion; it is also about cohesion, particularly in terms of institutionalised risk management and self-regulating regimes. To understand the operations of (social) inclusion and exclusion through the processes of risk governance, it is important to investigate the ways in which ruling relations of risk relate to institutions and create new institutional associations, such as when migration and racism are coupled with nationalism and gender equality in the politics of extreme right-wing parties: tolerance and equality, often associated with the Nordic welfare model, are echoed in current politics as ‘at risk’ from migration and the multicultural society, and we find today how these

risk regimes are paving the way for intolerance, discrimination, and violence in Sweden and the rest of Europe. To advance the understanding of risk governance and inequality, in the next chapter we will bring in the concept of performativity from feminist theory to show how intersectional risk theory can explore how social structures such as gendered risk regulation regimes position and act on us as subjects. In the search for an understanding of social structures that are not all-encompassing forces which can explain everything, performativity has attracted attention from gender scholars, and more recently, also risk scholars. Our take is to consider how conceptualisations of normalisation can open up room for an intersectional analysis of social structures and risk, and as such, can bridge the gap between gender and risk theorising. To do so, we need to start from the existing body of knowledge concerned with risk and inequality, which we will do in Chap. 4.

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Footnotes 1 Butler (2004), in her theorisation of gender, enhances the iterative performance of gender, thus noting that gender is constantly done but also always already done before. We apply this conceptualisation to the relation between risk and gender (as well as other power structures, see Chaps. 4 and 5).

 

© The Author(s) 2020 K. Giritli Nygren et al., A Framework of Intersectional Risk Theory in the Age of Ambivalence, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33524-3_4

4. The Performative Aspects of Risk and the Constitution of Subjects Katarina Giritli Nygren1   , Anna Olofsson1   and Susanna Öhman1   (1) Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall and Östersund, Sweden

 

  Katarina Giritli Nygren (Corresponding author) Email: [email protected]   Anna Olofsson Email: [email protected]   Susanna Öhman Email: [email protected] Keywords Risk – Intersectionality – Performativity – Normalization – Interpellation

Introduction To think about the performative aspects of risk means to consider the ways in which power operates and produces governable subjects. In this chapter, we continue to argue for the necessity of an intersectional analysis of how concealed structures of power are related to individuals. Whereas Chap. 3 dealt with those larger, discursive shifts, and ruling relations over time, through which different kinds of subjecthood become possible or impossible, this chapter focuses on how subjection works on and in the life of the subject, as a discipline and a means of self-governance (cf. Foucault 1991). The most obvious

policy field where risk is attached to individual bodies is that of social problems, since social problems are nowadays often framed in terms of risk and risk is used as a strategy in managing complex social changes both at the national and international levels (Olofsson et al. 2014). As a consequence, the actions of social institutions that deal with social challenges through welfare interventions are being transformed by the use of risk discourse and risk management practices; and particular categories of ‘vulnerable’ people are redefined, reframed, and— ultimately—managed as risks (Giritli Nygren et al. 2015). As we proposed in the previous chapter that inequalities are manufactured by modes of governance, including the use of ‘risk’ as intersecting classed, gendered, and racialised regulatory regimes, we need not only to uncover the ideological underpinnings of risk, but we also need to look more closely at its performative aspects (Montelius and Giritli Nygren 2014). In order to do so, we will expand on the understanding of risk in relation to normalisation through the closely related concept of performativity. This is in line with both Judith Butler’s (1990a, 1993) theories on this subject and Althusser’s (1970) description of interpellation. In the following section, we will start out by outlining the theoretical background of interpellation followed by a presentation of the existing studies that focus on how the biopolitics of risk and its relationship with normalisation are explored when a particular analysis of gender in relation to race and class is not specifically explicit. From there, we move on to discuss how feminist and intersectional theories can contribute to studies on the performative aspects of risk in relation to subjectification. Our point here is that this kind of power acts through moral norms, but the imperatives of self-governance as a response to risk make it necessary to analyse through an intersectional lens the kind of subject that becomes desirable in the process of risk management, and the kind of subject that does not. Finally, we will use the example of risk and pregnancy to show how the pregnant body is subject to processes of normalisation and self-regulation, and how these processes are gendered and ethnicised. Pregnancy can be related to the normalisation apparatus of biopolitics, where women self-police their behaviour and their behaviour is policed according to ‘expert’

advice, thereby becoming increasingly subject to risk regulation and prevention.

Acts of Interpellation and Ambivalence Althusser (1969/2000) used the term ‘interpellation’ to describe the very mechanism through which ideology interpellates the individual as a subject. He describes how the authoritative voice of the state recognises the individual and hails them into social existence. His famous example of what we feel whilst being hailed by a policeman is: ‘Hey you!’, towards which we turn guiltily and ask, ‘What did I do?!’ This shows how we transform ourselves into the self-as-a-criminal, thereby revealing where the force of the state and our identity as individuals meet. In a process whereby the discursive construction of risk is entangled with notions of morality, it becomes important to acknowledge that the avoidance of risk is inherently related to notions of the ideal ‘civilised’ body, whilst the indulgence in (non-normal) risky behaviour has come to be viewed as irresponsible and, sometimes, deviant. Risk, as a moral technology, has consequences for the way in which people view themselves—it hails individuals. Althusser (1970, p. 44) stated that ‘there is no ideology except by the subject and for the subject. Meaning, there is no ideology except for concrete subjects, and this destination for ideology is only made possible by the subject and its functioning.’ In this way, Althusser continued to say that ‘you and I are always already subjects, and as such, constantly practice the rituals of ideological recognition, which guarantee for us that we are indeed concrete individuals’ (ibid., p. 47). Interpellation contends a doubleness that captures ambivalence: in this society, we share the ideological belief that we are sovereign beings, autonomous subjects of ourselves; yet, in such moments, we are exposed as defined and possessed by forces beyond us. The subject is recruited by turning around. Our argument is that the interpellation of risk categories takes place in a relationship with other processes, by means of which gender and class, for example, are inscribed not only upon the surfaces of different bodies but also in their minds, with some constructed as normal and others as ‘at risk’ or even ‘risky’.

The internal dynamic of risk discourses involves the articulation of some kind of threat, a critical point of no return and a suggestion of certain preventative strategies. For this reason, especially if we think of risk in relation to inequality, it is important to investigate how the discourses of risk affect how we think about ourselves and the future. For example, if risk is seen as an empty or elastic concept that is open to signification, risk framing practices could (in theory) be constructed in myriad ways. Instead, the concept tends to ‘stick’ to or attach itself to certain discourses that clearly operate as a legitimation of the existing system. These complexities and other sometimes unexpected consequences arise from the fact that, rather than being a neutral, objective term, a (reliable) measure of social problems, or the likelihood of crisis or disaster, risk is actually ingrained with values and beliefs that are as powerful in their normalising force as the governance structures they permeate. Tracing discourses and uncovering the performativity of risk requires deciphering how proposed preventative strategies can be seen as a consequence of the articulation of a particular problem in terms of risk and its causal explanations. This kind of theoretical analysis can be used to disentangle the way in which the performativity of risk is intertwined with the processes by which class, gender, and race are constructed in a system, through which risk discourses can be mobilised and used to uphold other formations such as social norms.

Normalisation, Biopolitics of Risk, and Inequality In a governmental approach , risk is a component of diverse forms of calculative rationality in governing the conduct of individuals, collectives, and populations. When Foucault ([1976] 1990) describes how ‘the normal’ as a discursive construction has become a new power structure, joining the ranks of previously established societal power structures, he points to how, during the nineteenth century, the terms ‘norm’ and ‘normality’ brought something new to our way of thinking about ourselves and how we relate to one another. The terms ‘norm’ and ‘normality’ are thus central to an understanding of the processes of

normalisation, in as much as they combine scientific, technical, and political notions of what constitutes the individual and the community and how these processes work. Foucault (2008) referred to these processes as the biopolitics of the population, designed to regulate the population and control the body as the bearer of life—processes concerned with controlling reproduction, birth, mortality, health, domestic hygiene, and so on. Here, the use of risk, risk calculation, and risk prevention becomes a statistical and rhetorical device for a kind of normalising politics that connects human bodies with policy issues and constitutive power (see also Foucault 2007). As seen in Chap. 2, the governmentality literature, unlike essentialist risk theories, sees risk as ‘a family of ways of thinking and acting, involving calculations about probable futures in the present followed by interventions into the present in order to control that potential future’ (Rose 2001, p. 7). Many of these studies focus on the new risks that occur through the challenges of post-industrial societies towards old welfare states and welfare policy, to which they have responded by shifting some risks from the state to the individual (Bonoli 2007; Taylor-Gooby 2006). Hence, governmental risk management (intended to reduce uncertainty about future national welfare obligations) has offloaded responsibility for welfare procurement and use to the private consumer. The penetration of market relations and abstract systems into every aspect of the lifeworld compels the individual to choose. At the same time, these processes promote forms of market and institutional dependency. Each individual is to be their own political economy, an informed, selfsufficient consumer of labour markets, personal security markets, and other consuming interests. Within a regime of responsible risk-taking, differences (and inequalities) are often seen as a matter of choice (Shamir 2008). Following Foucault, Mitchell Dean (2006) emphasises that what is significant about the government of risk is that it is a way of ordering reality that renders risk calculable. Risk, here, denotes a family of ways of thinking and acting, involving calculations about probable futures based on historical events and calculations in the present followed by interventions into the present in order to control that potential future. From this perspective, the rise of risk thinking (see, for example, Hacking 1990) evolved through the combination of

historic, probabilistic, and epidemiologic knowledge that made it possible to identify factors associated with high risk and then allocate individuals to risk pools using an algorithm made up of these factors. The use of risk, risk calculation, and risk prevention as a kind of normalising politics that connects human bodies with policy issues and constitutive power is an important aspect of subjecthood and becoming a subject. Foucault differentiates between biopolitics and biopower, where biopolitics can be understood as a political rationality that takes the administration of life and populations as its subject, whilst biopower names the way in which biopolitics is put to work in society —a power that constitutes a transformation of the mechanisms of power (Foucault [1976] 1990). To ensure society’s continued existence, the population—along with its reproductivity, mortality, health, hygiene, and so forth—is controlled and moulded through various forms of normalising power techniques. Through such an analysis, it becomes clear how the concept of the normal easily glides between, or rather unites, an ideal and something that actually exists and how elusive and fluid the meaning of ‘the normal’ therefore is. This means that normativity does not express the soul of a people and cannot be seen as an inner essence contained within a population, nor even as a social construction that a population can rightfully see as its own (Fahlgren et al. 2016). Instead, biopolitical apparatus and biopower are understood as strategies and mechanisms through which the production of the subject takes place. Foucault shows how discipline individualises and normalises, and how biopower collectivises and socialises. In this way, risk discourses also enable individual identities to be linked to the biopolitical apparatus in disciplining, normalising, and protecting citizens. Many societal institutions have important normalising functions, for example the family, school, healthcare, the police, and social services. In this way, ‘the normal’ is shaped in specific contexts and thereby creates both opportunities and restrictions with regard to people’s actions, identities, and ideas, both in the form of privilege and obvious positions of power and in the form of repression and discrimination. Risk, as a governmental strategy to ‘defend society’ and manage social problems, operates through collectivisation as well as through the individualisation of subjects. This double aspect of risk technologies, individualising and collectivising, appears as a distinction

between disciplinary governance that acts on individual bodies, and security governance that acts on populations (Foucault [1976] 1990). Nikolas Rose expands on Foucault’s writing, arguing that biopolitics are merging with what he has called ‘ethopolitics’, a politics of life itself and how it should be lived (Rose 1999, p. x). Ethopolitics refers to the ethos of human existence—the sentiments, moral nature, or guiding beliefs of persons, groups, or institutions—which provides the ‘medium’ within which the self-government of the autonomous individual can be connected with the imperatives of good government. Ethopolitics focuses on self-techniques by which human beings should judge themselves and act upon themselves to make themselves better than they are. Rose (2001, pp. 6–7) thus develops his thought on how the contemporary relationship between the biological life of the individual and the wellbeing of the population as a whole is differently shaped: It is no longer a question of seeking to classify, identify and eliminate or constrain those individuals bearing a defective constitution, or to promote the reproduction of those whose biological characteristics are most desirable, in the name of the overall fitness of the population, nation or race. Rather, it consists in a variety of strategies that try to identify, treat, manage or administer those individuals, groups or localities where risk is seen to be high. The binary distinctions of normal and pathological, which were central to earlier biopolitical analyses, are now organized within these strategies for the government of risk. The governmental analysis brings the question of subjectivation/identification to bear on the technologies mobilised by security and humanitarian interventions, showing that their liaison is not simply a matter of contingency or imminent contradictions. Whether strategic and intentional or not, welfare reforms have effectively identified and singled out new ‘at-risk’ and ‘risky’ populations, including migrants, single parents, people with disabilities, long-term unemployed, and so on (Cumming and Caragata 2011; Dorey 2010). Claudia Aradau (2008) has shown how women ‘at risk’, such as

victims of trafficking, are insidiously metamorphosed into a ‘high risk’ group, where specific technologies are deployed under the banner of therapy. This is not done only to help these victims of trafficking to overcome their trauma and ease their suffering, the aim is also to limit the possibility of so-called dangerous eruptions, thus preventing them from staying in the country illegally. The risk of women migrating or being re-trafficked is therefore to be contained and prevented; they are to be surveyed and disciplined, and provided trauma therapy with the purpose of turning them into subjects that are able to monitor their own risk and, and at the same time, preventing them from illegal immigration into the country. From the standpoint of women, this prevention can only be read as a risk management of illegal migration where the victims of trafficking through risk-governing principles are turned into potential criminals. Together, the public identification of these categories and the socially differential effects of reforms threaten to create new layers of ‘risky’ populations along intersections of gender, ethnicity, and class (Giritli Nygren et al. 2015; Kelly 2007). Our point here is that the very naming of something as a risk creates impetus for certain forms of action, forcing individuals to embark on self-governance based on norms of what it means to make the ‘right choice’. This kind of power acts through moral norms, but the imperatives of self-governance as a response to risk are carried out in relation to collective subject positions of dangerous ‘others’ (Hier 2008), a formation that needs to be analysed in relation to other social processes (see Hunt 2003). By using intersectionality as a frame for highlighting the complexities of oppression, the analysis of risk discourses and welfare policy can move beyond its current, frequently inadequate, and inaccurate prediction of human risk, vulnerability, and behaviours (Giritli Nygren and Olofsson 2014; Hannah-Moffat and O’Malley 2007). For this kind of analysis, we believe that the feminist theorising of the performative aspects of gender can help us develop an understanding of how risk as a governing principle is performative and how it might be related to broader socio-structural issues of gender, race, ethnicity, social class, and ability, which are part of risk management frameworks in institutional settings (Olofsson et al. 2014).

Performativity, Subjectification, and Risk What has gender then got to do with the production of particular subjects at risk? Judith Butler, whilst developing her theory on the subject, explicitly describes the interpellation scenario as an instance of performativity. The police officer’s hail, described at the beginning of this chapter, is a performative utterance that brings the subject into being. Continuing the example of the policeman, Butler uses the example of the proclamation ‘It’s a girl!’ that is uttered at birth as the initiation of a process of ‘girling’ the female subject (Butler 1993, p. 232). Thus, ‘[t]he call is formative, if not performative, precisely because it initiates the individual into the subjected status of the subject’ (Butler 1993, p. 121). What Butler’s theoretical work has so powerfully elaborated is the paradoxical conditions through which the accomplishment of subjecthood is made possible. According to Butler (a thought present also in Althusser’s work), the becoming of a subject is the mastery of ambivalence and submission, which, paradoxically, take place simultaneously—not in separate acts, but together in the same moment: The more a practice is mastered, the more fully subjection is achieved. Submission and mastery take place simultaneously, and it is this paradoxical simultaneity that constitutes the ambivalence of subjection. Where one might expect submission to consist in a yielding to an externally imposed dominant order, and to be marked by a loss of control and mastery, it is paradoxically marked by mastery itself … the lived simultaneity of submission as mastery, and mastery as submission, is the condition of possibility for the subject itself. (Butler 1995a, pp. 45–46) Butler proposed that instead of preceding its actions as an entity with its own ontological status, the subject is constituted through its repeated performance of material and linguistic acts. In other words, subjectivity is not a state of being but a state of doing. Referring to the absence of a ‘gender identity’ prior to gender ‘expressions’, in Gender Trouble, Butler writes that ‘identity is performatively constituted by the

very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (1990a, p. 25). Performativity presents the emerging subject (or subjecthood or state of subjectivity) as having been produced discursively, rather than emerging from an essence internal to the individual. Thus, for Butler, gender is not merely produced as a social construct. The materiality of sex is, itself, created as a fluid and transforming reality. Although Butler shifts the focus of subjectification towards doing, which is sometimes understood in a very constructivist sense, she is decisive on the point that discursive performativity has a material reality (cf. Althusser 1993). In this, she counters social constructionist feminists that divide gender and sex into separate spheres of culture and nature. Sex is gender, according to Butler, because we inscribe meaning in the materiality of bodies and the environment, and produce meaning through our bodies’ actions. It is not just a matter of the subject relating to a specific regime; it is also a matter of how the regime infiltrates the subject’s very relation to itself. She argues that ‘the Truth regime offers the conditions under which self-recognition is possible’ (2003, p. 31).1 Although these conditions exist outside the subject, they are constitutive of the act of self-recognition and thus of the very existence and form of the subject. Although the ‘Truth regime’ does not fully determine the act of recognition, it defines the framework within which recognition can take place. As Butler (2003, p. 32) explains: ‘It establishes who comes into question as a subject of recognition, and it offers the available norms for the act of recognition itself.’ So, to analyse risk as performative subjectification means to identify and analyse speech acts that bring the subject into a risk-conscious self-regulating being. Based on this, one of the key arguments in intersectional risk theory is that risks are performative and are always co-articulated with other norms and discourses that, in turn, impact how (in)equalities are produced and maintained (see, for example, Olofsson et al. 2014; Giritli Nygren et al. 2015). This can be true of people far away or strangers amongst us whose lives do not seem precious or what Butler (2004) termed as ‘ungrieveable lives’. It is the biopolitical management that organises life that disposes some lives to precarity and uncertainty, without recognition (Butler 2015, pp. 196–197). However, there is a contradiction inherent in the assumption of the responsible and

resilient subject, because we are each expected to be responsible for ourselves and not for others, and to be self-sufficient, whilst at the same time, resources and the available subject positions are unequally distributed, thus making it impossible to take such responsibility—or in Butler’s words (2015, p. 14): ‘we are morally pushed to become precisely the kind of subjects who are structurally foreclosed from realising that norm’. By ‘failing’ to take responsibility, to self-regulate, mitigate, and manage risk, which for some will never be possible, one opens oneself up for public interventions. The concept of risk is used to categorise individuals or groups into ‘those at risk’ and ‘those posing a risk’. Similarly, Deborah Lupton (1993) argues that risk often serves to identify the Self and the Other, blame stigmatised groups, individualise structural inequalities, and so forth; as a consequence, we must analyse the ethical, political, and moral subtexts of risk. What has not been elaborated in the same way, however, is how some are not even considered to be ‘at risk’, or vulnerable, or risky for that matter, though their lives are often characterised by misery and precariousness. As discussed earlier, interpellation captures a duality—it constitutes and makes abject: we depend on it and resent it. The ‘abject’, according to Butler (1990b, p. 133), is a ‘structuralist notion of a boundary-constituting taboo for the purposes of constructing a discrete subject through exclusion’. To not be abject is to have control of the body and its functions, but the recognition of what counts as abject is regulated and authorised by the hierarchical discourses and practices of government. Which kind of subject is desirable in the process of risk identification, mitigation, and management, and which is not? We thus propose that whilst carrying out risk research, the moral dimension of risk must be taken into account.

Morality, Risk, and Its Intersectional Implications The connection between morality and risk is not new. Mary Douglas (1966) investigated this point in her book Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, which is about crosscultural understandings of the body and the social constructions of risk

(or danger). Rather than seeing risk as an objective danger that can be dealt with rationally on the basis of objective technological knowledge, early anthropological research emphasised that the risks we select, the way we perceive them, and our responses are determined by our institutions and social values (Douglas 1992; Douglas and Wildavsky 1982). Opposing rational-choice approaches, Douglas argued that it is our values that structure what we see as risky and how we respond to it. Social groups and societies construct and maintain their identities through the distinction between the self and other. In this way of reasoning, Douglas explored the question of where the body begins and ends as an anthropologist looking at ways in which people configure the body in different cultural sites. She demonstrated that the limits of the body serve as a metaphor for what constitutes a given culture. She said that all distinctions between purity and danger (here interpreted as risk) illustrates how a society works out its own ideas about what particular people think is proper and clean and the ways in which that defines who we are, which is in fact also about political relationships in terms of accountability and responsibility. However, Douglas developed a framework for the social constructions of risk and the moral boundaries it produces, but did not take into account how these cultural differences intersect with other inequality regimes such as gender and class. The concept of the ‘right choice’, or the imperative to act in a certain way in the face of risk, also has the effect of dividing people who are considered to be more at risk. The boundary between normative judgements of risk and objective hazards has, according to Hunt (2003), become blurred, and a hybridity between moral discourses and discourses of risk has been created. What is considered non-risky is constructed as normal, whilst actions that transgress the norm, or that could be labelled as deviant from this norm, are constructed as risky (Hunt 2003). Certain practices and selves are ascribed either a negative or a positive value, and this process is seldom as visible as when it comes to the ascription of the lack of moral worth as well as disgust for those who fail to live up to contemporary norms. The moral judgements that are formed as a consequence of the risk thinking described above do not, however, occur in a social vacuum. According to Hunt (2003, p. 171), it ‘is significant that despite the scientification of risk assessment,

explanations of risks are still frequently grounded in moral discourses that call into play issues of ethnicity, sexuality, and other social stereotypes’. One area where research has shown how issues of gender become intertwined with moral discourses and discourses of risk has to do with pregnancy and maternity care. Women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity have caught the attention of risk technologies (Coxon 2014; Van Teijlingen 2005), with pregnancy being seen as a state requiring careful and detailed risk prevention. The pregnant and labouring body is often constructed as unpredictable, leaky, and ambiguous (Lupton 2012), and the foetus, rather than the mother, is in the centre of attention and risk management (Leppo 2012; Lupton 1999, 2011). Pregnancy is, for women, a time when health practices and beliefs might change (Rudolfsdottir 2000) because of the view that women are personally responsible for the health of their foetus (Browner and Press 1995). Advice given to pregnant women is often normative and precautionary rather than based on probabilistic risk assessments (Leppo et al. 2014). Thus, even the smallest risk leads to recommendations to avoid particular foodstuffs, and information and guidance are expressed in terms of risk or within risk discourses, equating the normative with what is normal and different actions as not only a risk behaviour but also ‘abnormal’ behaviour. Furthermore, Mulinari (2011) shows how midwives embody the cultural gender norms, defining what is normal and expected, often framed as ‘natural’, in the transformation of women into mothers. In this way, pregnancy can be related to the normalisation apparatus of biopolitics where women self-police their behaviour according to ‘expert’ advice (Lupton 2013), thereby becoming increasingly subject to risk regulation and prevention (Coxon 2014), and being hailed into the concept of what it is to be a good/moral mother. Since this subjecthood is limited to the time of pregnancy, it projects into the future the identity as moral women, mother, and parent; and failure to adhere to norms might mean finding oneself categorised as immoral and abnormal, and therefore possibly ‘unfit’ (Stengel 2014). During pregnancy, the intake of foodstuffs and other substances into the body has become the focus of risk regulation in the Global North,2 and so the avoidance of risk through ‘healthy’ eating has also become

subject to the moralisation and judgement of others, based on the relative ‘healthiness’ of their eating habits (Montelius 2013). An illustrative example is that of the National Food Agency in Sweden, which recommends that breastfeeding women should not drink more than a couple of glasses of wine or its equivalent, a couple of times a week, as there is no clear scientific knowledge about the effects of alcohol during breastfeeding (www.​livsmedelsverket​.​se). The fact that there is no available research confirming any negative effects for the child does not prevent the agency from giving women recommendations, and pregnant or nursing women who fail to adhere to nutritional guidelines may be regarded as moral failures (Harper and Rail 2012). Another example is that weight, and particularly obesity, is increasingly emphasised as a ‘risk’ to the health of both the mother and the foetus even though evidence for this is weak (Harper and Rail 2011; Rasmussen and Yaktine 2009). Thus, assumptions concerning the risk of carrying a higher weight in relation to pregnancy mask the underlying discrimination and inequalities related to the availability of resources and instead uphold certain moral, neoliberal ideas and values (McNaughton 2011). Finally, advancements in biotechnology and assisted reproduction have, in some rare and extreme cases, led to the prosecution of pregnant women for foetal abuse, when they have not followed prescribed medical advice (Parker 2014). The performativity of risk during pregnancy is not only related to gender. On the contrary, it intersects with age, social class, and ethnicity in complex processes, forming individual behaviour through particular risk discourses. Thus, different subjecthoods, or subject positions, become possible in context-dependent discourses on risk and pregnancy. Nancy Ehrenreich (1993) illustrated the importance of analysing all positions from an intersectional perspective, which brings recognition that a privileged position does not necessarily mean the absence of subordination—rather, that it brings with it another kind of subordination or one with different consequences. For example, the interaction between risk and being white, middle class, and a woman can create a process by which women disempower themselves as subjects. Risk discourses interact not only with social class, race, and age, but also with cultural practices, as indicated by studies showing that middle-class women situated in contexts where alcohol is part of

social interactions negotiate health advice regarding drinking differently when compared to, for example, advice about smoking (Hammer and Inglin 2013). Thus, some social positions can increase the space for negotiation when the object of risk is an accepted cultural practice, whilst another position may limit it. Women who, because of a subordinate social position due to class, age, or abuse, are already categorised as ‘at risk’, fear stigmatisation and even losing their children if they do not adhere to health advice (Stengel 2014). This illustrates that oppression stems from the same complex web of mutually reinforcing hierarchies that support and perhaps disguise the disparate, oppressive conditions in which pregnant women exist (Ehrenreich 1993). Risk enhances the ethopolitics (Rose 1999) surrounding the pregnant body, where pregnancy is an act of performative self-governance, anchored in norms about ‘precious cargo’. Our argument is that by viewing risk as a catalyst for intersectional analysis, intersectionality can also be used to conceptualise risk. Intersectional risk theory as a way of exploring the performative aspects of risk could clarify how broader social structural issues of gender, race, ethnicity, social class, sexuality, and ability are part of risk governance frameworks (as in the example of maternity care), and also indicate how such structures produces certain projections of morality or immorality.

Concluding Remarks: From Risk Performativity to the Performance of Risk Chapter 3 dealt with how intersectional and gendered risk regulation regimes constitute social structures, how they interact with other regimes, and how they colonise society and everyday life. In this chapter, we have explored how regimes, often transformed into risk discourses, are performative in their relation to us as subjects. The moral components of the discourses of risk mean that individuals are expected to self-regulate based on norms of what it means to live a moral, or rather ethical, righteous life (Hunt 2003; Rose 2007). Risks, risk discourse, and talking about risks are performative in that the talk tends to result in certain perceptions and behaviours. As a subject, you

act according to performative risk discourses. This is to be considered as the work of processes of normalisation, where the conduct of the individual is governed through moral discourses of responsibility, a process that then masks itself by framing the conduct as the outcome of a free and individual choice (Giritli Nygren et al. 2015). Or, as expressed differently by Butler (2009, pp. ii–iii): Precarity is, of course, directly linked with gender norms, since we know that those who do not live their genders in intelligible ways are at heightened risk for harassment and violence. Gender norms have everything to do with how and in what way we can appear in public space; how and in what way the public and private are distinguished, and how that distinction is instrumentalized in the service of sexual politics; who will be criminalized on the basis of public appearance; who will fail to be protected by the law or, more specifically, the police, on the street, or on the job, or in the home. Who will be stigmatized; who will be the object of fascination and consumer pleasure? Who will have medical benefits before the law? Whose intimate and kinship relations will, in fact, be recognized before the law? We know these questions from transgender activism, from feminism, from queer kinship politics, and also from the gay marriage movement and the issues raised by sex workers for public safety and economic enfranchisement. So these norms are not only instances of power; and they do not only reflect broader relations of power; they are one way that power operates. After all, power cannot stay in power without reproducing itself in some way. And every act of reproduction risks going awry or adrift, or producing effects that are not fully foreseen. It is in this way, I would suggest, that a Derridean notion of iterability enters into a Marxist conception of the reproduction of domination and, indeed, the reproduction of personhood. In the Global North, we share the ideological belief that we are sovereign beings and autonomous subjects of ourselves, but we are at the same time exposed, as defined subjects, and possessed by forces beyond ourselves (Guralnik and Simeon 2000). Risk discourses

interpellate individuals in the same sense, and in this performative act, we become subjects of risk discourses and their underpinning values and priorities. In the same way, a policy programme or media news, whilst naming risky or at-risk subjects, brings them into being. This normalising act often takes place along contemporary hierarchies of power—the act of naming is performative, precisely because it initiates the individual into the subjected status of a subject (cf. Butler 1993, p. 121). It is important to note the difference between performativity and performance. From our point of view, performativity itself does not refer to subjects doing risk, as performativity is primarily a constitutive process, a social force that allows one to meet and to assemble, and is the constitution of regulatory notions and their effects. The subjective enactment, however, implies the performance or taking of risk. Risk discourses, therefore, can (and should) be investigated both from the angle of performativity, namely, its constitutive and regulatory notions and how it brings certain subjects into specific kinds of being, and from the angle of subjectivity, that is, how they are enacted and negotiated (see Tulloch and Lupton 2003). The term ‘performance’ implies enactment, or how subjects act in relation to risk in everyday life, and thus how self-governance is performed rather than prescribed. The iterative process of performativity, that is, the enactment of the ideal that can never be fully achieved or accomplished, and therefore is always incomplete, opens up for subjective performance and resistance. We will elaborate on how risk can be theorised as performance, or how risk is ‘done’ in greater detail in Chap. 5.

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Hier, S. P. (2008). Thinking beyond moral panic: Risk, responsibility, and the politics of moralization. Theoretical Criminology, 12(2), 173–190. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1177/​ 1362480608089239​. [Crossref] Lupton, D. (1993). Risk as moral danger. The social and political functions of risk discourse in public health. International Journal of Health Services, 23(3), 425–435. [Crossref] Lupton, D. (1999). Archetypes of infection: People with HIV/AIDS in the Australian press in the mid 1990s. Sociology of Health and Illness, 21(1), 37–53. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1111/​14679566.​ t01-1-00141.​ [Crossref] Lupton, D. (2012). Precious cargo. Critical Public Health, 22(3), 329–340. [Crossref] Lupton, D. (2013). Risk and emotion: Towards an alternative theoretical perspective. Health, Risk & Society, 15(8), 634–647. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1080/​13698575.​2013.​848847. [Crossref] Montelius, E. (2013). Natural, home-made and real: Gender and class in internet postings. In K. Giritli Nygren & S. Fahlgren (Eds.), Mobilizing gender research: Challenges and strategies (Working Papers 5) (pp. 89–98). Gender Studies at Mid Sweden University. Montelius, E., & Giritli Nygren, K. (2014). ‘Doing’ risk, ‘doing’ difference: Towards an understanding of the intersections of risk, morality and taste. Health, Risk & Society, 16(5), 431– 443. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1080/​13698575.​2014.​934207. [Crossref] Olofsson, A., Zinn, J. O., Griffin, G., Giritli Nygren, K., Cebulla, A., & Hannah-Moffat, K. (2014). The mutual constitution of risk and inequalities: Intersectional risk theory. Health, Risk & Society, 16(5), 417–430. [Crossref] Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom. Reframing political thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] Rose, N. (2001). The politics of life itself. Theory, Culture & Society, 18(6), 1–30. https://​doi.​org/​ 10.​1177/​0263276012205202​0. [Crossref] Stengel, C. (2014). The risk of being ‘too honest’: Drug use, stigma and pregnancy. Health, Risk & Society, 16(1), 36–50. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1080/​13698575.​2013.​868408. [Crossref]

Footnotes 1 See description of the truth regime in Chap. 3, p. x.

  2 Research focusing on risk in pregnancy and birth is divided between the Global South and the Global North, reflecting global inequalities in terms of access to research in general and medical resources in particular. Sociological and social scientific research with an interest in gender and social class therefore tend to focus on conditions in countries in the Global North (Coxon 2014).

 

© The Author(s) 2020 K. Giritli Nygren et al., A Framework of Intersectional Risk Theory in the Age of Ambivalence, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33524-3_5

5. Doing, Redoing, and Doing Away: Performing Risk Katarina Giritli Nygren1   , Anna Olofsson1   and Susanna Öhman1   (1) Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall and Östersund, Sweden

 

  Katarina Giritli Nygren (Corresponding author) Email: [email protected]   Anna Olofsson Email: [email protected]   Susanna Öhman Email: [email protected] Keywords Risk – Intersectionality – Performance – Doing gender – Resistance

Introduction In this chapter, we will theoretically explore the necessity of addressing both performance and performativity. We will also argue that a focus on performance is necessary in order to fully understand both the power dimensions involved in risk and to identify ways in which they can be challenged. Whilst we now position agency in the foreground, it is still in relation to ideology and other normativities that structure the lives of people. Thus, we move towards a discussion about reality in conjunction with discourse, or the constructed, and a life where ‘I’ always already am performed together with others:

Perhaps most importantly, we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance—to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient “I” as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven. (Butler 2009, p. 136) As mentioned in Chap. 1, the ontological status of ‘risk’, that is, are risks ‘real’ or merely our construction, has been debated intensely, and it is fair to say that the research community is far from agreeing on this issue. From our perspective, we do not find it necessary to reach an agreement; on the contrary, it is the ambivalence and dialectics between agents and structures, ideas and materialism, as well as determinacy and rationality that we are trying to theorise and to identify ways to explore. Regardless of whether the risks are real, they have materialised consequences in everyday life. Our aim is to recognise the epistemological question of the relationship between discourse and reality, that is, how we can gain knowledge about this relationship, arguing that the local and particular is an important site of knowledge if we wish to understand the links between personal experiences of everyday life and aspects of a wider social organisation. In our research we have, as mentioned before, proposed the ‘doing risk’ framework for this kind of analysis as a way to explore the embodied experience and emotions related to risk governance and relations of ruling from the perspectives of the people participating in them. In this chapter we present this framework and develop it further in the realm of intersectional risk theory. The theory we promote highlights the need for an analysis of the ‘doings’ of risk not only from the perspective of a discourse that interpellates individuals into certain subject positions, as discussed as performativity in Chap. 4, but also from a perspective that acknowledges the power dimensions in those

‘doings’ in terms of performance (Giritli Nygren et al. 2017). Thus, there is a need to understand how subjects perform themselves in a way that is intelligible to others, and how the performativity of intersecting categories of power interacts with risk and risk objects in the life of the individual (see also Boholm and Corvellec 2011). Risk behaviour that becomes self-regulating, embodied, and ever-present is as much the doing of risk as it is the doing of gender, class, race, sexuality, and so on, and creates a complex and situated understanding of risk in everyday life. In this chapter, we start out by situating our arguments on the doing of risk in the field of risk research and examine particularly how subjectivity and risk reflexivity have been theorised and investigated in risk research. We argue that whilst undertaking research that explores risk in everyday life, or from the perspective of the subject, one should take the position and the emotions of the investigated or the speaker into account and the ways in which the doings and redoings of risk can be used as a resource for some whilst also positioning and fixating others. People’s consciousness is situated in specific discursive and practical contexts. These are developed within relationships of power —relationships that they can act strategically to reproduce or resist the specific discursive framework, and practical relationships that locate them in a position either to rearticulate or disrupt and, thereby, make risk irrelevant (cf. Hernández Carretero and Carling 2012; Wallman 2001). This implies that doings of risk in everyday life to a large extent also involve a struggle over definition and the power to construct something as risk (or not) (Giritli Nygren et al. 2015). To theorise this, our main inspiration comes from two thinkers, one already introduced in previous chapters, Judith Butler, and the other, Sara Ahmed. The second part of this chapter deals with Butler’s development of a theoretical thinking of doing gender, and particularly the performance of gender as an iterative process in everyday life, and how it opens up for an understanding of the ways in which risk is negotiated in conjunction with not only gender but a broad spectrum of assigned positions that the individual is targeted by. This section also introduces Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology, which offers a good understanding of how to read specific risks from a subjective and phenomenological point of view. Ahmed’s combination of

phenomenology with postcolonial as well as queer theory in her theoretical thinking allows the subject as well as the body to be in the foreground, without letting go of the conditions that restrain and enable the subject both physically and socially. The third and last part before the concluding words discusses the redoing and undoing of risk in terms of coming up against lines and the possibilities of destabilising power and how the social and physical contexts in which the subject is located have a direct bearing on their understanding of risk and feelings of security. The chapter ends with some concluding remarks and an outlook towards Chap. 5’s more existentialist perspective.

Reflexivity, Individualisation, and Risk Subjectivities Risk society, the cultural theory, and governmentality are often repeated as the theoretical base on which the social scientific research on risk and uncertainty rests. At the same time, much empirical risk research tends to focus on how people perceive and handle risk and uncertainty in everyday life. Another particularity, not in social science but in policy and risk management, is its entanglement with scientific analysis in terms of risk assessment and risk analysis—an entanglement that rests on the assumption that if we have knowledge of a risk, it should be managed and controlled, whereas everyday life often takes contingency and uncertainty as normal and adaptation to uncontrolled factors as a routine necessity (Wynne 1991). Hence, the attempt to understand and explain subjective meanings of risk and uncertainty is in the foreground, and although often framed in contemporary commodified concepts such as risk society, much risk research often assumes that it is through the subject, and the subject’s actions, that knowledge of both the individual and the social is achieved, as for example in Anthony Giddens’ (1991) operation of reflexive modernisation at the individual level (see also Beck 1992; Zinn 2016). Giddens (1979, 1984) develops his version of ‘practice theory’ in his framework of the ‘theory of structuration’, which rests on an assumption that individuals have the ability to reflect on their

actions—an ability that expresses itself as methodological attitude, a kind of reflexivity, which permeates the formation of social structures. Similarly, Ulrich Beck (1992) discusses reflexive modernisation; however, contrary to Giddens, Beck does not necessarily theorise the structure/agency divide, but rather the consequences of structural changes and the role of risk for the subject and social structure (Woodman 2009). Although Beck is often categorised as a thinker giving the subject agency, this is done in the context of structural change where risk, born out of modernity itself, is the driving force. According to Beck (1992), the individual is subject to changes in late modernity, including individualisation, proposed to make individuals free from traditional constraints, which in fact results in less rather than more individual freedom or agency due to increased dependency on the market and the welfare state. This change is accompanied by a responsibility of the individual, who has to manage their own life as well as personal identity reflexively as self-confrontation in the wake of risk.1 Hence, the individual becomes the producer of themselves but needless to say is neither free nor equal. Social inequality might, in fact, increase in late modernity, although the blame and responsibility are put at the individual level (Giddens 1990). From this perspective, people are positioned as risk subjects who experience and respond to risk, a line of thought not very different from ours. However, we follow some of the critics who argue that individual reflexivity is not a matter of risk regulation but is rather conducted through the individual’s membership of a community (Lash 1993). The community brings with it moral and culturally learned and shared assumptions and preferences that the individual internalises. As discussed in Chap. 2 in relation to Dean Curran’s development of the risk society thesis, we, Curran, and many other sociologists agree that risk can mask or mystify structures such as gender and class, but does not replace these structures and the inequalities that they carry with them. Thus, it is necessary to extend Beck’s reflexivity, to speak not just of individualisation but of reflexive community, whose necessity of risksharing should be at the heart of any contemporary politics of the commons (Lash 2015). Based on this theoretical reasoning, institutional forms of translation can be analysed as individual selfreflective processes, thus making it possible to formulate agency,

resistance, or change in the institutional forms of knowledge that legitimise a prevailing order and technology in the individual selfreflexive processes. This is also in line with Mary Douglas (1985, 1992), who has challenged the individualistic model of the rationalist actor and argued that it is important to recognise the individual’s location within a community or subcultural group. Douglas drew attention to the fundamental distinction between the Self and the Other running across cultures and interpretations of social contexts and used it to provide an understanding of the multidimensionality of socially available semantics and perceptions of risk. The main concerns here are the different ways in which different people understand risk, how people construct their identities and membership of social (sub-)cultures referring to risk, how the understanding of risk is engaged in ‘border crossings’ between Self and Otherness, and how people interpret risks as positive (Lupton and Tulloch 2002; Tulloch and Lupton 2003) as well as negative. Thus, the connection between risk is seen as a means for defining both the preferred Self and the unpreferred, ‘other’ position. In this way, by acting responsibly in the face of certain risk, you, as, for example, being pregnant, achieve recognition; you might gain status by taking other risks, for example in the financial market, and yet becoming ‘the other’ by exposing yourself for some risks, such as by using hard drugs. As many sociologists studying risk and uncertainty point out, there is little focus in theories on reflexive modernisation on how individuals actually respond to discourse and disciplinary strategies in their everyday lives, and how these responses relate to structures of power. This calls for an analysis of the subjective dimensions of risk as they are lived in specific social and cultural contexts and their comprehension of how discourses of risk alongside, for example, gender are taken up or resisted by individuals as a means of establishing subjectivity. To do so, the focus needs to be directed towards the ways in which people enact, negotiate, and resist acts of interpellation as exemplified by the discussions on what Robertson (2000), as well as others, calls ‘at-risk consciousness’, which in her study gave rise to a certain type of subjectivity, an entrepreneurial subject (see Rose 1999), which made them engage in particular health practices as ‘self-care strategies’. Thus, risk management is not only individualised, but the individual also

adopts calculative, active, and prudent attitudes towards risks. For instance, Heidenstrøm and Kvarnlöf (2017) show in their empirical analysis of household preparedness how moments of reflexivity make the performance of informal preparedness visible, and how this reflexivity, often based on previous experiences, creates potential to change the practices of household preparedness. Furthermore, Robertson (2000) argues that health discourses making the ‘self-care’ and the self-surveilling entrepreneurial subject possible reproduce a new kind of citizen, a neoliberal risk-taking person who takes the responsibility of risk management, whilst social structures and collective responsibility are not discussed or even visible, and politics is no longer held responsible for the situation. Needless to say, the entrepreneurial neoliberal citizen is gendered, racialised, and classed. If one wishes to explore risk as everyday enactments, the work of Deborah Lupton and John Tulloch (e.g. 2001) offers a good starting point, but an intersectional reading of concepts such as reflexivity, subjectivity, discourse, and resistance—where the ideas of self and discourses of power and control meet the incorporation of feminist knowledge—is also of key importance. Although Lupton and Tulloch acknowledge the role of gender, ethnicity, and class for understanding how individuals act in relation to risk in specific contexts, their main interest has been in voluntary risk-taking, showing that risk is part of everyday life experienced as both positive and negative. Moreover, their focus is more on the choices of individuals than how inequalities might affect these choices. However, it might not be that simple, since the social practices required for demonstrating femininity and masculinity are associated with the performance of very different health and risk practices (Courtenay 2000). In this way, the health and risk behaviours and beliefs that people adopt simultaneously define and enact representations of gender—meaning that whilst various risk factors or objects may be experienced and negotiated at an individual level, their actual social distribution remains structured by factors such as gender, ethnicity, and class (cf. Merryweather 2010). The next section will present our own elaboration of Judith Butler’s and Sara Ahmed’s theories for the understanding of the performance of risk in everyday life and their entanglement with doing gender.

Performing Risk: Doing Gender Without repeating the entire discussion on Butler’s conceptualisation of performativity in Chap. 4, we want to return to her understanding of performance in the practice of performativity. We do this since we seek to develop a perspective that can be applied in risk research to better understand the dialectics between subject and structure, as well as body and discourse. First, a short reminder: for Butler, the concept of performativity is an attempt to find a more embodied way of rethinking the relationships between determining social structures and personal agency. For example, gender, or sex for that matter, does not exist outside its ‘doing’ but its performance through certain highly regulated practices is also a reiteration of previous ‘doings’ that become naturalised as gender norms and materialise in and on bodies. The necessity of reiteration is, according to Butler (1993), a sign that materialisation is never quite complete, that bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialisation is impelled. The performance, rather than fixity of identity, at least allows for the possibility of challenging and parodying these naturalised codes. How performance differs and relates to performativity is complex and our interpretation is based on Butler’s own discussion of the concepts in her book about bodies that matter (Butler 1993). Hence, performance is the practice through which performativity is enacted, but as Butler (1993) points out, this is not an act in isolation: performance always involves context, other bodies, and backdrops, since it is not a selfconstitutional act of a subject without anchoring. Rather, performance always happens in light of something in order to appear as just ‘performance’. Although not self-constitutional, performance does the subject, only it does so with regard to the social and material coordinates and relationships that make the subject possible. The material boundaries of a body simultaneously create it and make it socially created; the boundaries drawn between this body and other human and non-human bodies to which it is connected make it possible for these other bodies to support, or make performance possible, because without support, there is nothing (Butler 1993). Hence, according to Butler, it is the performance of the subjective body in

interaction with others that constitutes agential subjectivity. However, based on the understanding of reiteration as practice and the opening for challenging and mocking in the performance—of gender for example—we find a particular form of agency, which at times has been described as formed out of the vulnerability of the individual (Butler interviewed by Sara Ahmed 2016). This vulnerability comes out of the gender assignment that we already face from the start, from the first announcement—‘It’s a girl!’—we are vulnerable to the effects of this assignment. According to Butler, this kind of vulnerability can be seen as the origin of subjective will, and hence, it is not vulnerability in a passive way, because gender assignment and the vulnerability that it brings with it also make us animated. We become animated since no one is ‘really’ quite the same as the norms, or ideals, that govern who we are supposed to be (Butler interviewed by Sara Ahmed 2016). Later in this chapter we will return to how this will, or drive, together with errors in our performance, opens up the way for agency and deviance (Ahmed 2012, 2014), in terms of refuting and revising existing norms and assignments. Whilst Butler focuses especially on gender and sexual identities, this sense of the performativity and performance of sex and gender has recently been set to work to think about the performance of nationhood and ethnic identities (Ahmed 2000, 2012). We try to consider how the performance of gender, ethnic identities, nationhood, and class link to the performance of risk in everyday practice. There is a complex web of interrelations between the individual’s various assignments or positions in society, which together influence not only an individual’s vulnerability to and understanding of risk, but also how and why we perceive certain objects as risk and how they come to be associated with different emotions, such as excitement or fear.

Following Lines, Orientation, and Doing Risk ‘Doing risk’ can help us investigate how risk is intrinsically connected to the processes by which the norms of gender, ethnicity , class, and sexuality are socially and intersectionally performed. To do risk means that you act in a certain way to avoid something unwanted, but when you act in line with expectations to ‘pass’ and avoid the risk itself, or to become the risk, you might do so in line with racialised,

heteronormative, gendered, and classed norms. From our perspective, the act of, for example, not walking home alone at night because of fear of sexual assault, is the doing of risk at the same time as it constitutes respectable femininity. Not performing according to expectations causes anxiety and even fear (Butler 1993), a fear that might be greater and more significant than considering a particular risk, since it is related to subjectification and self-identity. As Stanko (1997) shows in her studies of women’s risk assessment, the responsibility of safekeeping and risk assessing practices is embedded within a routine consciousness about being ‘properly feminine’. As a woman, you can perform femininity through the fear of assault; similarly, young men perform masculinity when they walk alone although aware of the risk of violence, or even performing the violence, being outside or at home. Thus, the discursive and actual violence are both part of doing gender and maintaining complex and unequal relations between different genders. Meanwhile, gender is by no means to be seen as binary, male and female, but as a spectrum of identities. Ahmed (2006) uses the concept of the line to describe how these kinds of cultural patterns or histories of association, such as gender norms and fear of particular risk objects, are transferred and maintained (see also Butler 1990a).2 So, each time you target someone or something, you follow a line that has already been drawn, like a script or a schema. We make sense of the world through already established scripts, but it is each individual that in each moment activates them; to be able to target something, this line must already be drawn, because it must be possible to see the way up to the target. Thus, lines are sorting us all the time, and the world is filled with lines that orientate our behaviour and desire. An illustrative example of the ways in which this has bearing for the studies of how people do risk are studies into the ways in which race and queer subjects access and encounter healthcare systems. In her study of how black womanhood is performed in relation to stereotypes by healthcare workers, Sacks (2018) illustrates how black women achieve recognition and avoid mistreatment by using a scientific rationality conveyed by conducting extensive research prior to the healthcare encounter but also consciously conform their appearance to white middle-class norms. Another example is in our own research, which shows how transsexual

persons sometimes avoid encounters with healthcare although they may be ill and in need of care (Giritli Nygren et al. 2016). Moreover, Ahmed points out that there are ‘memories’ of the bodies that entered a given room in the past, which create the conditions and limitations for the bodies arriving later (Ahmed 2006, p. 15). This means that the bodies that follow the line and direction of previous bodies are always already oriented; spaces are created by the repeated actions of bodies, which make oriented bodies feel comfortable. As in the study of city safety by Sjöberg and Giritli Nygren (forthcoming), interviews with wheelchair users show that feelings of insecurity and disorientation are strongly linked to being able to move around unrestricted. Stairs, narrow passages, and cobblestones all become objects of risk that are associated with feelings of being unsafe. Emotion is an important component here, just as in other risk research. In psychological risk research, although affect and emotion are given great importance in the process of perceiving risk, affective, insensitive, or subconscious, gut feelings are distinguished from cognitive and conscious judgements of risk (for an overview, see Slovic 2010). We, on the other hand, and many social scientists before us, view risk, affect, and emotion as inseparable (Lupton 2013; see also Ekholm and Olofsson 2017). Thus, an emotion constitutes a stance; it has a direction and an orientation. We will probably try to move away from the things we fear or the things that make us feel uncomfortable, whilst we will turn to the things we like and the things that make us feel good. Often, our emotions do not resonate with our cognitions. This is frequently the case particularly in relation to risk: It does not matter that I know that it is safe to travel by aeroplane, I might still be afraid whilst flying. Risk ‘emotional assemblies’, to use Lupton’s (2013) expression, are also an example of the ambivalence inherent in notions of risk. It is simply not possible to separate risk calculation from the memories of bodies that have inhabited or controlled a particular place, memories that both materialise and become part of the discourse, making some feel comfortable, some uncomfortable, and yet others ambivalent. The association with ambivalence brings us back to intersectional risk theory: We do not intend to define different types of risks and groups individually as isolated processes but aim to think about how risks resonate as risk emotional assemblages (cf. Lupton 2013) with subjects

and as a result of structures of power in particular settings (Olofsson et al. 2014; cf. Butler 1993).

Passing, Avoiding, and Managing Risk Risks are done through social practices and positions in everyday life, and people respond and live with risk but also avoid and manage it. One way to act towards certain risks, such as those related to discrimination and racism, heteronormativity, social class, and so forth, is to try to ‘pass’, as mentioned earlier in this chapter. To pass as native to a country, for instance, might negotiate the risk of being discriminated against because of having a foreign background whilst looking for work or a place to live. In our interviews with people identifying as queer, we were told many stories about ‘passing’ as a way to avoid discrimination (Giritli Nygren et al. 2016). For example, lesbians might act like friends rather than as couples in order to rent an apartment, gay men do not hold hands or show affection publicly to pass as straight and so avoid harassment or even violence. This does not change the risk per se, as discrimination, harassment, and violence are all still practised. However, by passing, the risk is avoided at the particular time. Furthermore, to pass is not necessarily a practice performed without difficulty, not least in terms of one’s own identity. As Matthews (2007) points out, if someone successfully passes, there is nothing essentially discrete about them as otherwise it would not be possible. Thus, to pass as heterosexual, as a woman, as an academic, one has to perform an idealised condition of whiteness, or whatever position, which makes this act fundamentally conservative (Matthews 2007). Hence, no change in accountability structures or destabilisation of the system itself can be achieved this way, since to pass in this respect means to perform something that you do not identify with, which can be the same as losing oneself. Thus, passing, as well as the danger of the failure to pass, can be a way of upholding hierarchical social categorisations. An example from our own research shows how the hegemony of heterosexuality has similar effects for those not conforming to heteronormativity, and that heterosexual bodies actually limit the possibility of non-heterosexual bodies. In our attempt to uncover the doings of risk and inequality, two of the authors of the book gathered a

group of people, all with non-heteronormative desire, for an interview about how they understood risk. Although they had never met before, just one look around the table was enough for each of them to grasp that this was not an interview about ‘risk’, but about what they called ‘gay risks’. In previous analyses of how risk is done in public places, it has been shown that the construction of specific risk objects perceived by the majority society as, for example, a ‘gay risk’, fails to recognise that risk is in fact embedded in the everyday lives of people who do not conform to heteronormativity precisely because of this kind of categorisation and association between sexuality and risk (Giritli Nygren et al. 2016). This makes heteronormativity, along with its expression in the shape of hate crimes, discrimination, and exclusion, a risk object performed not only by perpetrators of violence and people at large, but also by researchers, for not acknowledging heteronormativity as a source of risk, and those exposed to these normative structures, for acting accordingly. To pass as heterosexual thus becomes a way to manage risk in everyday life, but the act of passing comes with the cost of generating an oppressive normativity. However, to extend our understanding of the structural and interactional processes involved in the production of risk and inequality, we also have to acknowledge that risks and the accountability structures they are entangled with are being contested, reconstituted, and negotiated. That is, risk is also redone or maybe even undone in everyday life. The question is, how can we understand the destabilising dynamics of power through the redoing and undoing of risk?

Coming up Against Lines or Destabilising Dynamics of Power Through the Redoing and Undoing of Risk Risks, when negotiated in interaction with our social positions and identities, not only reproduce structures of power but also are sometimes ‘redone’ or even ‘undone’ (see Butler 2004). Undoing a risk involves disrupting that risk and making it irrelevant as a social artefact (cf. Connell 2009). Risk can be undone in different ways, namely,

deliberatively or indirectly, by actors who challenge existing norms and beliefs associated with a particular risk object. However, the step from redoing to undoing is not necessarily an either/or, neither sharp nor exclusive. In feminist theory, there is extensive literature on doing and undoing gender, and queer theorists have said much about ‘undoing’ or at least unsettling the normativity of heterosexuality and gender in order to destabilise male/female and hetero-/homosexual binaries.3 This, however, is by no means the same as thoroughly undoing gender, race, and heterosexuality themselves—but rather doing away with them. Butler’s performative subversions, for instance, are not so much undoing gender as doing it in new ways (Butler 1990). Transgressive sexual and gender performances, moreover, can have little social effect without an erosion of material inequalities, as well as the distribution of risk, associated with gendered divisions of labour and resources and a dismantling of the institutions through which heterosexuality’s privileged place in society is sustained. To change the complex web of relations between risk objects, social positions, and practices is difficult to achieve as an individual, but by repeatedly identifying and challenging these intersections, structures can alter over time. One way is through disorientation, destabilisation, and deviance, always bearing in mind that if we start to feel too comfortable, ‘when things are (assumed to be) flowing’ (Ahmed 2012, p. 185), it might be that we actually are reproducing the patterns we wanted to challenge. Starting with deviance, we return to the previous discussion on how effects of assigned gender and other positions open up for both vulnerability and action, paving the ground for a ‘wilful’ subject (Ahmed 2014). It is by acknowledging that we are reproducing ourselves as, for example, women, black, and/or poor, becoming aware that we have become who we are interpelled to be, that we can start to deviate (Ahmed 2014), or as Butler puts it, start retaking, taking over, and refusing (Butler interviewed by Ahmed 2016). Since we are moved to speak when addressed (or hailed), either we accept the terms by which we are addressed, even though they are not in line with how we want to be assigned, or we refuse the categories through which we have been formed, in order to begin the process of self-formation within and against these terms (Butler interviewed by Ahmed 2016, p. 486). However, deviation creates anxiety and fear but also thrill and, done

together with others, new forms of solidarity that make it possible to ‘risk a new sense of being a subject’ (p. 484). In our study of heteronormativity and risk, the participants witness how they sometimes acted in a deviant fashion, for example by riding the underground in full drag or hugging a partner in public, refuting the risk by taking a risk, not necessarily for oneself, but as an act of solidarity and change (Giritli Nygren et al. 20164). With references to, amongst others, Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, Ahmed highlights how bodies that do not follow the (designated) lines are ‘stopped’, particularly how the non-white body is ‘stopped’ and disoriented in white spaces (Ahmed 2011, p. 131). Owing to past stories of colonial legacy and ethnic hegemony, race has become a matter of orientation (Ahmed 2011, p. 132). The non-white body, or the underprivileged, might have its presence or behaviours questioned in a way that the white body does not. Rooms created by the repeated actions of white bodies limit the possibility of non-white bodies to be extended by these spaces, just as spaces inhabited by privileged classes are unavailable to the underprivileged. Beverly Skeggs (2005, p. 971) has, with reference to Ahmed, elaborated on the latter, showing how gender, class, and risk are entangled in the lifestyle business. Skeggs argues that affect in terms of danger, adventure, and risk, is used as a way of revealing ethical personhood, and display the improving moral self, as well as a good, interesting, adventurous, risk-taking person. For the middle class, ‘choosing’ danger, adventure, and risk may enhance personal exchangevalue and speed promotion, whilst for the working class, it is likely to result in imprisonment. Working-class women are more likely to refuse victimhood, cover up injury, and endure to display that they can cope (Skeggs 1997). Previous risk research confirms this, showing that risk is often seen as at least ambiguous and not seldom something positive (Gjernes 2008; Tulloch and Lupton 2003). As Skeggs points out, risk can represent a resource, not only for the middle class, and in certain contexts risk can be a way to advance in the social hierarchy, for example in risk-related sports, or to gain acceptance amongst peers. For instance, smoking was shown to be experienced as a resource in many situations, for example as part of practising an identity or a social practice (Graham 1987; Oakley 1989; Greaves 1996; Gjernes 2008;

Poland 2006). However, experiences of uncertainty because of disorientation can also lead to insecurity and heightened perceptions of risk, whilst being oriented renders feelings of security. Risk perception studies have documented such patterns for a long time, where particularly white male bodies in the Global North report little worry, about anything from climate change to violence in public places (e.g. Finucane et al. 2000; see Olofsson and Rashid 2011 for risk perception that follows lines of inequality), as described by Gabe Mythen and Sandra Walklate (2006, p. 231): ‘The manufactured insecurities of everyday life cannot tell us much about how to make sense of social conditions and the inequalities that human beings encounter in managing their lives.’ Hence, we have to dig deeper, we have to understand the socio-economic circumstances that are attached to these insecurities perceived by the subject that is performing risks and insecurities in conjunction with normative interpellations hailed upon them (Ahmed 2006, p. 107; see also Sjöberg and Giritli Nygren forthcoming). From our perspective, the presence of disoriented bodies in, for example, decision-making positions can destabilise and therewith start a process of redoing risks associated with, for instance, discrimination. This has been illustrated in studies of risk and food: with the cultural resources to perform the ‘doings’ of risk comes also the possibility of performing a kind of ‘undoings’, of risk being acceptable as long as one has the cultural resources to tell it in the right way (Montelius forthcoming; Katainen 2010). This becomes important, given that the (re)production of class and gender by and large is about knowing cultural reference points and how to deal with them. In this way, the line of risk research known as edgework, or risk-taking, can be understood better as doing risk rather than as being examples of how certain risks are taken, although, in the intersection between class, gender, and age, activities such as mountaineering and skydiving are turned into symbols of achievement rather than self-propelled danger (Lyng and Matthews 2007). Knowledge about (un-)preferable risktaking in itself is thus not the only thing that counts; the ability to conceptualise that knowledge in relation to others is part of the processes by which differences are upheld. Needless to say, such knowledge is often community specific, or even tied to subgroups:

authorities and other risk communicators often misinterpret the resistance towards risk-reducing activities such as health advice, nonsmoking campaigns, and disaster preparedness information as either ignorance, lack of knowledge, or simply deviance. What they misinterpret in their analysis is how this ‘resistance’ interlocks with identity work and available orientations. For example, the resistance to anti-smoking campaigns amongst aboriginal people in Australia could be reinterpreted when understood as a social practice rather than as ‘yet another’ example of aboriginal deviance, and doing so provides a stronger starting point for connecting with aboriginal people meaningfully (Bond et al. 2012). Thus, smoking can be part of practising an identity and any attempt to change this behaviour is perceived as a threat to the identity of the community. Similarly, studies of indigenous women in Norway show that health advice tends to trigger identity work where the reconfiguration of one’s identity was the stimulus for considering smoking cessation possibilities, rather than the other way around (Gjernes 2010). Both these examples include intersections of risk, ethnicity, and other social structures, and reveal how not complying with risk mitigation policy is part of identity work. It is an undoing of the risk of racialisation or of not being seen as who you are, and at the same time, another risk is done: the risk to your health.

Concluding Remarks: From Doing Risk to Living with Risk In this chapter, we have outlined our view on risk as performance, proposing the ‘doing risk’ framework for such analyses as a way to explore the embodied experience and emotions related to performative risk governance and relations of ruling from the perspectives of the people participating in them. A prerequisite for doing, resisting, or redoing risk as a category of power, is to reveal how risk is interwoven with intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and so on. The idea of following or coming up against lines, borrowed from Ahmed, is intended to make us aware of objects and lines that we otherwise do not have the ability to perceive because they are not in line, or part of

the orientation we have learned and internalised. By becoming aware of the orientations that we take for granted, we can begin to discover the lines that guide our bodies to and away from different objects. In the same way, it might be an awareness of how moments of disorientation, when a foreign object emerges and creates confusion or discomfort, could be an interruption. This offers an opening for reflection and learning something about oneself, others, and the sociophysical contexts we live in but do not see in everyday life. A deviant, or queer, orientation is made possible, according to Ahmed, when a subject with non-normative desire, for example a lesbian, meets another subject with a similar desire. Our research also shows how being exposed to one risk, say due to sexuality, might trump the health risks you face. Hence, to ‘redo’ a risk, even if it is to one’s health, has to be carried out through a wider shift in social practices and identity, considering that no risk behaviour is performed in a vacuum or in isolation. In this way, risks are negotiated in relation to both other risks and other social practices in everyday life. Translated into our discussion on ambivalence, it may be possible to redo everyday risks without challenging any structures of power; rather, people seek to embrace the risk reflexively and have the ambition to develop practices and live life in their preferred way despite the risk, or by placing the risk in brackets (Giritli Nygren et al. 2016). Hence, as we have argued throughout this chapter, risks are performed, and the redoing of a risk means reproducing the risk but also reshaping the accountability structures that are associated with the doing. For example, the #Metoo movement in 2017, when women in different professions in many countries spoke out about sexual assault they had faced and named perpetrators who for years and years sexually harassed and abused women, does not undo the risk of sexual assault, at least in the short term, but it might reshape the accountability structures and the dominant scripts. By speaking of the everyday, the everywhere, and presenting the sexualisation and abuse of women and trans persons publicly, it is no longer just an issue for the individual subjected to such risks but a collective responsibility, where employers and politicians can no longer act as if they are not aware of the existence of such behaviours.

In this chapter we have also drawn back from the implications of a one-sided social constructionist understanding of gender, which assumes that the whole of human potential equals the sum of its gendered parts and that all we can achieve is a remix of identities and subjectivities constructed through gender division. From a more sociologically informed and materialist perspective, this cannot be the case. The whole idea that a subject can be fully understood or ‘complete’ needs to be questioned. If human beings are social beings, then what we are depends on the society and culture we inhabit. If men and women are products of a hierarchical relationship, in the absence of that relationship, very different subjectivities, identities, and desires might emerge and these would have nothing to do with gender. If we have discussed the relationship between discourse and experience here from the perspective of subjects in relation to the discourse, or how we interact with discourses through performances, we will move our analysis to an exploration of more existentialist readings of subjectivity and experience in the next chapter.

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Footnotes 1 Beck repeats this in his writings, for example: ‘The concept of “reflexive modernization” … does not signify reflection (as the adjective “reflexive” seems to suggest), but above all selfconfrontation’ (Beck 2009, p. 109, emphasis in original).

 

2 Compare with Butler’s (1990a, p. 272) use of script in the following citation: ‘The act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene. Hence, gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again.’

 

3 Owing to the preoccupation with deconstructing binaries, the subversion of gender is widely thought of as a multiplication process: making the boundaries between genders more fluid and creating more genders by moving between and combining elements of the formerly standard two. This does not challenge gender itself: you do not subvert a hierarchy by introducing more ranks between the dominant and subordinate.

 

4 For a more detailed presentation of this study and the results see Chap. 8.

 

© The Author(s) 2020 K. Giritli Nygren et al., A Framework of Intersectional Risk Theory in the Age of Ambivalence, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33524-3_6

6. The Lived Experience of Risk: Multiple Standpoints and Agencies Katarina Giritli Nygren1   , Anna Olofsson1   and Susanna Öhman1   (1) Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall and Östersund, Sweden

 

  Katarina Giritli Nygren (Corresponding author) Email: [email protected]   Anna Olofsson Email: [email protected]   Susanna Öhman Email: [email protected] Keywords Risk – Intersectionality – Standpoint theory – Phenomenology – Everyday

Introduction So far in this book, we have tried to show how intersectional risk theory can be used to analyse the intersection of risk and inequality as a structural process. We have also looked at what these structures are doing with us and what we are doing with them by outlining the fruitful distinction (and combination) of performativity versus performance. In Chap. 5, we used Ahmed’s queer phenomenology as an entry point to analyse how different objects become associated with risk and the ways in which individuals navigate and negotiate these objects of risk— together with the performance of gender, class, and ethnicity in relation

to risk, or as we propose, the doing of risk (cf. Butler 1993). In this chapter, we introduce a different phenomenological strand into the analysis of risk, which we describe as an existential standpoint phenomenology of risk. Considering risk from the vantage point of everyday affective life offers an alternative approach to the master narratives about global conditions that sometimes circulate in risk studies. Talk of permanent war, states of exception, and new security regimes, important and useful as it might be, frequently operates at such a high level of abstraction that it fails to address the lived experiences of these systemic transformations. [I]t is no doubt impossible to approach any human problem without partiality: even the way of asking the questions, of adopting perspectives presupposes hierarchies of interests; all characteristics comprise values; every so-called objective description is set against an ethical background. Instead of trying to conceal those principles that are more or less explicitly implied, we would be better off stating them from the start. (Simone de Beauvoir 2011, p. 16, The Second Sex) Drawing particularly on feminist epistemologies based on the insights of standpoint theory together with Simone de Beauvoir’s writings on phenomenology, we want to pay attention to the importance of analyses of the subjective first-person character of risk awareness: an awareness that always starts from a particular point of view, a kind of ‘here-ness’ specific to ‘me’ (see, for example, Mensch et. al. 2006). We believe that it is important to develop our understanding of agency, or agencies, to uncover the subject or, more precisely, the individual reality of sensual and corporeal experience, and acknowledge that it is possible to find a conjunction between risk, power, and inequality in the understanding of the everyday practices of risk. Our argument is, as stated in the introduction, that it is also necessary to gain knowledge of the lived experiences of risk to understand the relationships between the ambivalence between individual/subjective and collective/structural dimensions and the way this generates conflicting frames (cf. Merton and Barber 1976). We are interested in how, for many of us (an ‘us’ that includes a range of social

positions and identities in need of specification), everyday life produces feelings of despair and anxiety, sometimes extreme, and hence barely differentiable from just the way things are, feelings that get internalised and named, for better or for worse, as risky. All humans have an idea of what fear and uncertainty means for them in everyday life. Risk is a phenomenon that crosses vocation, gender, race, age, socio-economic status, marital status, or any ‘status’ or group that humans use to organise themselves and identify with. The meaning ascribed to it may vary, depending on one’s personal experience, and may include everything from stock market fluctuations to whether a medical treatment will be successful. With our aim to bring feminist thinking into the sociology of risk and uncertainty, the emphasis here is on the last line of research, namely the phenomenological and not on studies of risk perception or behaviour departing from psychological, or other perspectives of (rational) actors. Before we begin our exploration, we acknowledge the extensive field of risk research in the social and behavioural sciences that have consistently focused on agency in the study of individual risk perception, behaviour, and communication (for an overview, see Burgess et al. 2016). Even the sociology of risk and uncertainty has a predisposition towards agency in the study of risk in everyday life, in terms of sense-making and ‘in-between strategies’, not least because of the tradition of interdisciplinary research with psychologists and economists and the interpretative, phenomenological approach that is commonly applied and further developed (Brown 2016). In the following, we will start by presenting research on risk from a life-world perspective and then move on to introduce how risk research has been engaged within different development contexts. Thereafter, we will develop our thinking on how feminist epistemologies can inform intersectional studies of risk.

The First-person Character of Living with Risk and Uncertainty The concepts of subject and subjectivity are key issues in sociology, as well as in the sociology of risk and uncertainty. Although only a few

studies investigate risk from an intersectional existential standpoint, risk in everyday life has become the hallmark of sociological risk research. Much research in the vein of exploring individual sensemaking, trust, and faith seeks to accomplish a grounded approach to what it means to comprehend and live with risk. Theoretical developments in the field of interpretive risk research have grown out of phenomenological perspectives emphasising the lifeworld perspective, often drawing on Schultz and Garfinkel’s developments of Husserl’s philosophy (Brown 2009). However, there is also a significant number of studies with a more existentialist and corporeal understanding of risk inspired by Heidegger, in particular Science and Technology Studies (van Loon 2002), and the embodiment of health risks (Turner 1992). Furthermore, ethnomethodology has contributed to both methodological and theoretical development in risk research. For example, building on Lévi-Strauss’ discussion of the engineer and the bricoleur, Horlick-Jones et al. (2007), make use of bricolage as a way to demonstrate how people incorporate discourses and norms related to a particular process at hand just as they do other cultural resources, personal experiences, and selfhood. Similar to intersectional risk analysis, the same object, process, or subject might be interpreted differently depending on, for instance, the individual’s previous experiences and discourses associated with their social positions. The idea of an autonomous individual subjectivity is simply rejected, and instead, the actor is often theorised in the context of life experiences and their social microcosm—the life-world surrounding them. However, they are not simply a passive subject reduced to their experiences and social positions; these elements are resources in everyday life, giving the bricoleur a sort of agency—a subject that is in the world and makes sense of it and its uncertainty, according to available resources. Thus, pockets of autonomy are made possible through the slippage between the shaping of actions according to institutional practice, and actors’ capacity for pursuing situationspecific agendas (Horlick-Jones and Prades 2009). Risky situations pose tricky moral dilemmas whilst simultaneously offering opportunities for micro-political action (see Connolly and Haughton 2017).

It is here that we find most of the empirical studies, in the exploration of the subjective sensation and corporal experience of living with risk or insecurity, embedded in a social context. This realm of research is often grounded in ethnographic epistemologies (and ontologies), where the individual’s experiences and sensory perceptions, and sometimes embodiment thereof, are the (only) paths for the subject to grasp the world and for the researcher to comprehend the individual as much as society (Brown 2016). When not everything is given, the subject needs to act, and just as a desire or a hope or trust might lead a subject in a new direction, a moral dilemma or fear of a hazard might uncover the subject in the world, acting. This micropolitical model of risk identifies the slippage between formal and informal risk practices and shows how risk has the capacity to bring out certain inherent aspects of social interaction in particularly forceful ways and to generate possibilities for action (Horlick-Jones 2005a, b). These thoughts have been incorporated into the theorising of risk and life-worlds, and wider historical and contemporary circumstances through which the subject experiences and understands the world (Brown 2016). Although research utilising class and gender perspectives is not uncommon in studies of risk form the life-world perspective, it is probably fair to say that these often take power for granted, or at least, power is rarely theorised from an intersectional perspective, and feminist existentialism is seldom applied. There are exceptions though; for example, Turner and Wainwright (2003) observed, through a phenomenological understanding of the experiences of risk and injury amongst ballet dancers, how injury and ageing reinforce the dancer’s status and identity. Although ballet injuries can terminate a dancing career, they are accepted as an inevitable part of ballet, and dancers testify about how an injury not only leads to professional disruption but also to the need to reinvent oneself (Turner and Wainwright 2003, p. 284). Thus, living with risk is an embodied and institutionalised part of the profession and identity of dancers, where gender and age intersect with pain and injury. The existentialist approach in risk research is found in the conceptualisation of edgework, understood as an authentic, transcendent corporeal activity in late modern society (Lyng 2012).

Edgework is said to capture an example of hermeneutic reflexivity beyond mere cognitive reflexivity, through the analysis of voluntary risk-taking in extreme sports and adventure where risk is thought of as thrill, generated by physical threat. Within these existential explorations of edgework, it is also possible to find clearer connections between feminist and risk theories. After the initial, one-sided focus on white middle-class males and malestream gender assumptions, edgework developed and made it possible to question both gender and class stereotyping (Batchelor 2007; Walklate 1997). From an intersectional perspective, the influence of gender and class is particularly interesting as edgework research illustrates that voluntary risk-taking might also be part of performing a specific kind of white middle-class masculinity, as for example in rock-climbing.

Existential Phenomenology and Engaging with Risk in Non-Western Settings In many ways, risk analysis, like risk research, can be seen as a colonising concept and practice. As we have outlined in previous chapters, risk constitutes power or is, at least, a tool in the exercise thereof. However, there is growing interest in the lived experience of risk at the margins of society, as well as beyond everyday life in the Global North, where the contextualised, corporeal, and sometimes gendered experience of risk and uncertainty that often involves suffering is exposed through ethnographic field studies (Desmond 2015; van Voorst et al. 2015). Just looking at the bulk of research, medical and health research stands out, and there are numerous relevant studies on HIV in sub-Saharan Africa (for a critical approach, see Rudrum 2017). It is as if HIV has become a symbol for risk research in the Global South, and with it, a discourse of risk as a postEnlightenment project has emerged. Some argue that due to the influences from various waves of colonialism and, more recently, developmental projects and aid, people in sub-Saharan Africa have developed an understanding of risk according to public health and medical discourse and as a heuristic behavioural concept that exists to be overcome or minimised and that can only be deconstructed by

anthropologists (Desmond 2015). In the same line of argument, Desmond (2015, p. 2008) claims that an ethnographic method is required to understand an emic perspective of risk in the Global South and that risk, as a colonising concept, should be addressed as embodied through experience, particularly in non-Western settings. Drawing on the writings of Saba Mahmood (2011), it is possible to propose that there is a problem here. She contends that a shortcoming of the European and North American feminism has been the lack of intellectual focus on problematising its own political starting point. This starting point rests on an inheritance from the Enlightenment, which is often based on the liberal idea of the human being as a transcendental subject, independent of historical and external conditions and as such able, through rational thought, to express rational requests. This is often brought along with specific understandings of what it means to have agency, that is, the subject is dependent on specific agency opportunities, which are restricted to what is considered rational and self-oriented in the Western (liberal) tradition, to attain self-realisation. To be able to expand the definition of agency, and accordingly the dimensions of human action beyond these frames, Mahmood argues that it is necessary, first and foremost, to separate the idea of self-realisation from the Western and liberal idea of the autonomous will. Thus, there are other ways to become a subject; and there are other types of agency and freedom, for example understood as a capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination such as religious belief also allow and produce (Mahmood 2006, pp. 33–34). Whilst researching risk from the firstactor perspective, we believe that it is necessary to problematise the inheritance from the Enlightenment, no matter where or with whom in Europe, Australia, or Africa you might carry out your study. This is also where ambivalence comes into play. Societies need to be understood and explained by using ambivalent and shifting perspectives that are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and if they are, they may simply need to be understood as coexisting. This involves ambivalence in terms of certainty and uncertainty, as well as structure and agency. Without establishing an understanding of the ‘centre’, and the existing world order, current positions will continue to be the taken for granted, although often unconsciously, thereby reinforcing common

perceptions of not only the centre but also the margins. As for risk research, this means that if we want to study the experience of risk in the Global South, it should be accompanied by an examination of what the analysis, maybe unintentionally, brings with it in terms of taken-forgranted assumptions, theoretical understandings, and methodological practices. Perhaps, as proposed by Mahmood, we should consider agency more in terms of the capacities and skills required to undertake particular types of acts (where resistance to a particular set of relations of domination is one type of act), and as ineluctably bound up with the historically and culturally specific disciplines through which a subject is formed. Subjectivity is not only about producing radical countersubjectivities; it is also about daily practices and negotiations within the dominant norms. When risk researchers in the Global North turn their interest towards the Global South, it is as if we mirror ourselves. The question is, what do we see? Thus, maybe what we carry out is an introspection of ourselves or at least of neocolonialisation. Whatever we see, the two dichotomies, South and North, are defined and constituted. Some scholars also argue that we should return to the work of Mary Douglas and certain anthropological research (Alaszewski and Wilkinson 2015), and perhaps it is anthropologists who can uncover the taken-forgranted concept of risk, in the North as well as in the South, and then culture as a construct will reveal itself through ethnographic research in the global periphery. Another interesting question is why such kinds of studies, which have long been carried out by anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, and the like, have begun catch the attention of the research community only now. Is it due to the changes in the Global North during the end of the 2010s and the increased focus on Islam, which in contrast to Christianity, seems to be read through the risk lens, and thus, certain risks tend to ‘stick’ to Islam in a way they do not to other religions? So, discourses in the Global North tell us risks should stick, perhaps because muslims are seen as the other, despite all current and historical evidence that terrorism and violence is deeply rooted in Christianity. Last but not least, we would like to make a comment regarding the wakening interest among researchers in the Global North to do research in the Global South: A lot of research based on the

phenomenology of risk prioritises the standpoint of the underprivileged, which of course is important. But it is equally important not to forget the significance of investigating the points of view of those who are, in some way, privileged. Why is it particularly important for risk research to integrate such a critical stance in the research process? As seen before, risk is intimately related to power, and by investigating the lived experience of risk, not only does one initiate a potential process for change, but more importantly, such investigation may generate a new way to conceptualise and manage risk that is not so deeply invested in the Enlightenment and the following modernisation paradigm of the Global North. We therefore believe that standpoint theory and situated knowledge are important starting points for understanding the relationships between risk, experience, the selection of the ‘other’, and subjectivities, as they can help deconstruct dichotomous ways of thinking.

Feminist Epistemologies and Studies of Risk Feminism engaging with the experiences of certain subject positions like that of women and/or of being a woman such as standpoint theory, and the existentialist feminism of Simone de Beauvoir, are ways of thinking that we find important to acknowledge with respect to intersectional analysis of risk. Hence, standpoint theory can be summarised as a set of theoretical and epistemological propositions designed to produce alternative knowledge. Such alternative knowledge is necessary, because it destabilises dominant androcentric knowledge production that excludes women and other unprivileged groups. Standpoint theorising is then necessarily rooted in specific material conditions, such as women’s experiences. However, in the process of building alternatives, standpoint theory has to separate itself from dominant modes of knowledge production and address attempts to be subverted from within. From this position, there is no universally objective perspective from which we can view the world, since every purportedly ‘objective’ standpoint can be shown to bear the mark of social, political, and cultural influences, even in its most basic assumptions (Haraway 1988). In this sense, we think of standpoint theory not as a kind of methodological individualism but as a dialogical

epistemology that leaves the conceptual tension between the ‘group’ and the ‘individual’ unresolved. Taking our cue from Dorothy Smith (2005), a feminist sociologist renowned for developing a distinctively feminist-oriented sociology that argues that the abstract, all-encompassing theories common in sociological thought are problematic in that they come from an implicit male standpoint where the salience of perspective, context, and difference are often glossed over. We advocate that the beginning of research should not always be in the realm of abstract theoretical systems, but can equally be based on the standpoint of everyday life. In starting with people’s experiences, Smith argued that sociologists can then move out to explore the institutions and social relations that structure and often exert control over these actors’ lives. “Standpoint” as the design of a subject position in institutional ethnography creates a point of entry into discovering the social that does not subordinate the knowing subject to objectified forms of knowledge of society or political economy. It is a method of inquiry that works from the actualities of people’s everyday lives and experiences to discover the social as it extends beyond experience. (Smith 2005, p. 10) Feminist theory, as a way of understanding the subordination of women, continues to remind us that what is important is not only how or what we know, but what we do with that knowledge. Thus, research, as a social practice, is itself never free from power. This calls attention to the fact that women are not the only subordinate groups whose standpoint is valuable, but also that the standpoints of groups based in other orders, such as class, race, and colonialism, are equally important if we are to understand the functioning of privilege and subordination, and the ways in which these orders are used to construct one another. In feminist theory, as already mentioned, the standpoint that is expected to emerge from a specific marginalised positioning has sometimes been claimed to provide a privileged access to liberating knowledge. This also means that by investigating the standpoint of the underprivileged, we may gain access to knowledge otherwise unavailable.

Accounting for the situated knowledge subject that underlies standpoint thinking is also central to the existential-phenomenological feminism related to the thinking of Simone de Beauvoir. Existentialist phenomenology provides an epistemological and ontological departure point, commencing neither from the assumption of an objective world ‘out there’ nor from a pure and constituting consciousness, but rather from a dialogic in which the world, body, and consciousness are all fundamentally intertwined, interrelated, and mutually influencing (Laurendeau 2008). As with standpoint theory, existentialist phenomenology highlights the situatedness of the human experience, including gendered experience and behaviour (de Beauvoir 1974; Young 1980), and is also important for the analysis of much inter-embodiment. Embodied experience then, for both materialist feminist approaches and existential-phenomenological philosophy, is at the core of claims to knowledge. In this sense, the uniqueness of the concept of a ‘gendered self’, which de Beauvoir explores in The Second Sex, cannot be overemphasised. Feminist epistemology admits, as a starting point, that there are differences in perceptions that are attributable to differences in the concrete, lived realities (gender being one important difference) of those doing the perceiving—and in doing so, it furthers the original philosophical project of knowing ourselves and of understanding the nature of thought. Though feminist epistemologies emphasise the standpoint of women in their everyday lives, standpoint thinking can be linked to the ways in which the theories of race and ethnicity as well as LGBTQIA theories explore the complex relationships between identity, geography, and oppression (e.g. Anzaldúa 1987; Connell and Dados 2014; Garroutte 2003). In this context, the notion of standpoint can be used to explore the structural and materialist dimensions of culture. Furthermore, through the concept of standpoint, race and ethnicity, and LGBTQIA, scholars can claim positions of privileged knowledge that counter dominant unmarked knowledge. Instead of one feminist standpoint, there could be many, including black feminist and lesbian standpoints, as well as standpoints related to feminism and class, and a plethora of different divisions, all resulting in distinctive standpoints (Fawcett and Hearn 2004).

A central contribution of existentialist phenomenology for our development of an intersectional risk theory is the conceptualisation of existentialist ambiguity: De Beauvoir claimed that an ethics that does not recognise the fundamental ambiguity of human existence cannot claim to address the concrete reality of human existence. In spite of a rational or a consoling ethic, the individual is still acutely aware of the paradox of his/her lived life. De Beauvoir’s argument, therefore, is that ambiguity is a constituent of human existence, and thus cannot be denied. She claimed that, from the beginning, existentialism recognised this and defined itself as ‘a philosophy of ambiguity’: The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalisation of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man’s condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence. (de Beauvoir 1947, p. 129) Epistemologically, intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989; Brah and Phoenix 2004; Lutz et al. 2011) can be seen as a development of feminist standpoint theory as well as that of the ethics of ambiguity, which claim in somewhat different ways that it is vital to account for the social positioning of the social agent as described above, and by focusing on multiple standpoints, the potential pitfalls of assuming a fixed existence can be avoided. Moreover, multiple and intersecting standpoints also inhabit the ambiguity so well described by de Beauvoir and which we believe all humans recognise not least in relation to risk in everyday life. There are, of course, studies within feminist studies of phenomena that are approached as risks (such as prostitution, trafficking, sexual harassment, etc.) and within the field of risk and gender studies where risk is researched from a kind of intersectional standpoint phenomenology. These studies often reveal how subjective experiences of risk are related to gender in diverse ways and also how the everyday

contains multifaceted experiences of risk that go beyond the researchers’ scope of attention. In this way they illustrate, in line with our own arguments, how standpoint theory contributes to the understanding of risk phenomena. For example, a study of the everyday risks in sex work from the standpoint of female sex workers, shows that their subjective experiences are affected not only by the legal context of sex work but also by their age, experience, and self-esteem, as well as how, for some of the women, problems associated with homelessness, drug use, and extreme social isolation far outweigh the risks associated with sex work (Pyett and Warr 1999). Another example is Edge’s study of mental health amongst black British Caribbean women (see, e.g., Edge 2010, 2013; Edge and Rogers 2005). Edge situated the study in the context of epidemiological studies, where strong correlations between deprivation, ethnicity, and mental health are found repeatedly (and in which black British Caribbeans are overrepresented). These studies are mostly based on investigations of men with serious mental illnesses, with women rendered essentially invisible, explained by discourses of their being ‘hard to reach’ (Edge 2008). By starting out from the standpoint of black British Caribbean women, Edge and Rogers (2005) highlighted how culturally based conceptualisations of mental health and illness influence if, when, and to whom people turned to for support. The women in their study drew strong boundaries between feeling depressed and having depressive illness and tended to fall back on the self-concept of being ‘strong black women’, meaning that they themselves found strategies to cope, without seeking formal help. Quite often, they applied spiritual imperatives to their social realities, which on the one hand gave them the strength to cope, but on the other, served as a barrier to seeking help, since depression was understood as a sign of spiritual weakness. The approaches underlying these two studies closely related to those of feminist epistemologies, present both in standpoint theory and the existentialism that de Beauvoir developed, and indicate how an intersectional analysis of risk and multiple standpoints can be carried out.

Conclusions

What does all this mean for intersectional risk theory? Intersectional risk theory takes the idea of subjectivity in risk research one step further by bringing in feminist epistemology and standpoint theory. Rather than problematising the relationship between the subject and the social context, and other subjects, standpoint theory puts this relationship in brackets and instead invests in apprehending knowledge through the eyes of the beholder whose position is (multiple and) subordinate (Smith 2005). However, from the existential standpoint and the phenomenology of risk perspective, we have suggested in this chapter that analyses of the privileged as well as subordinate positions are of interest to facilitating an understanding of situated imagination and knowledge associated with the first-person character of risk awareness (Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis 2002). It will help us move beyond predefined gender expectations and gendered concepts, such as control in the analysis of, for example, risk-taking as an authentic experience, as well as predefined risks, leaving them open to exploration. Furthermore, by incorporating existentialism and recognising the ambiguity in knowing that there is no fixed existence, the often quite realist understandings of lived experiences are challenged (Beauvoir 1947). It is not only a matter of openings in the fabrics of social structure as in bricolage (Horlick-Jones 2007), where the individual in their moral dilemma exercises their own agency, or as in the life-world (Brown 2016), where in-between strategies, such as trust and hope become a means to manage ambiguity and uncertainty. It is also a matter of generating knowledge without predefined understandings of the social context, based on the conditions of the particular subject, in a particular place, at a particular time. By placing the relationship between the subject and the social context in brackets, the experience of illness, injury, and loss, or some kind of gain, for that matter, can be unconditionally explored (as far as that is possible), sometimes in an existentialist way, thus challenging the often realist assumptions of lived experiences and open up for ambivalence. In the next chapter, the discussion on agency and structure is not only disregarded, but altogether blurred and questioned, and the corporeal dimension is also a matter for artefacts as well as bodies. We examine whether our own theorisation of risk, intersections, and

inequality can be informed by new materialism and other theories that understand the world as different materialities, or agents, both humans and non-humans, gathered in relational assemblages, without other meta-level structures. In particular, we further explore the openings to embrace ambivalence when the dialectic understanding of the social world, and therewith, power and risk, is replaced by a ‘flat’ ontology.

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© The Author(s) 2020 K. Giritli Nygren et al., A Framework of Intersectional Risk Theory in the Age of Ambivalence, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33524-3_7

7. Risk Networks: Actors, Actants, and Assemblages Katarina Giritli Nygren1   , Anna Olofsson1   and Susanna Öhman1   (1) Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall and Östersund, Sweden

 

  Katarina Giritli Nygren (Corresponding author) Email: [email protected]   Anna Olofsson Email: [email protected]   Susanna Öhman Email: [email protected] Keywords Risk – Intersectionality – New materialism – Actors – Assemblages

Introduction In this chapter, we will relate our analysis of risk to what has sometimes been called ‘the material turn’ in social sciences (Van der Tuin and Dolphijn 2010). There are some insights we consider important for an intersectional analysis of risk that have not yet been elaborated upon in the previous chapters. They are not entirely different but have also not fully been enabled by the conceptual developments we have discussed so far in terms of actor versus structure and the combinations of the two perspectives. The material turn, or new materialism as it has become known as more lately, is

intimately associated with the works of, for example Bruno Latour (2005) and Karen Barad (1996), where matter is studied in terms of what it does, rather than what it is. By challenging any distinction between the materiality of the physical world and the social constructs of human thoughts and desires, new materialism includes analysis of how things other than humans can be social ‘agents’ (cf. Barad 1996). It is based on a resistance towards the modernist binary opposition between nature and culture, offering instead a flat ontology of human and non-human actors. Thus, the actor’s perspective is all encompassing and the difference between humans and environments is dissolved through a shift from essentialism to relationality where the capacity, and thereby agency, of humans as well as non-human things, organisations, and even abstract concepts to affect each other in assemblages of interacting relations is in focus (see Braidotti 2011; DeLanda 2006; Barad 2007). However, instead of discussing ‘agency’, new materialism considers all materialities within an assemblage to have capacities to affect and to be affected by other assembled relations, thus, ‘agency’, or rather capacity, is not something inherent or essential, but a consequence of interactions with other relations (Fox and Alldred 2015). New materialist sociology is thus ‘post-anthropocentric’ (Braidotti 2011, p. 327), shifting humans from the central focus of sociological attention, and facilitating a posthuman sociology that can engage productively with the world beyond the human: with other living things, and with the wider environment of matter and things. Instead of social structures, systems, or mechanisms the focus is on ‘events’, and the relational character of these events and their physical, biological, and expressive composition becomes the means to explain the ‘becomings’ that produce the world around us. In the following section, we will start with a brief overview of the materialist turn, and the particular contributions that we draw on in our own framework, followed by an overview of how new materialism has been picked up by researchers involved in risk research. We then return to intersectional risk theory and illustrate what a dissolution of dualistic epistemology can mean, as well as what it cannot mean, from our perspective.

To Turn or Not to Turn: Materialism in the Wake of Poststructuralism ‘New materialism’ has, during the last couple of decades, become the way to denote a range of perspectives that have in common a ‘turn to matter’ (Barad 1996, p. 179) often in opposition to poststructuralism, and what has been called the linguistic turn. This analysis shifts attention away from human bodies and individuals on to the intraactions within material assemblages of bodies, things, ideas, and social institutions, and focuses on the micro-politics of constraining forces on bodies, that is their environments, and the capacities that these assemblages produce (Fox and Alldred 2017). Living bodies, entangled in their environments, in other words, are the matter at hand or the ‘stuff of matter’, rather than the constructivist use of linguistics and the discursive turn. Without any claim of giving an overview, or even scratching the surface, of the current development in new materialism, a few words are needed both to introduce the framework for the uninitiated, and to point out what intersectional risk theory can gain by adopting some of the insights offered by this perspective. The material turn, which developed during the 1990s, is not a coherent stream of thought. However, there are a number of shared assumptions, some of which have already been mentioned in the introduction. The so-called flat ontology represents one of the common denominators, that is, the view that the world is one, and not constituted through dialectic relationships between actors and structures, culture and nature, the rational and the irrational, and so on. It is an agential realism, where phenomena are not seen as representations but rather as ‘das Ding an sich’ [the thing-in-itself] (although not in the Kantian definition), and the world can only be understood through the analysis of the relations of intra-actions (Barad 2007), where all matter has the capacity to affect within the realm of assembly, or the actor network as in terms of Actor–Network Theory (ANT). This means that the theoretical challenge that is often discussed in sociological theory to understand humans as both social and biological, cultural and natural, is dealt with here by a monist ontology that does not differentiate between humans and non-humans or

between the social and the natural. When Barad (2007) characterises her thinking as posthumanist, it also means that she is taking a firm stand against liberal humanist individualism. We are, she argues, entangled in many more forces than we can possibly be aware of: ‘To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence.’ ‘Existence’, she says, ‘is not an individual affair’ (Barad 2007, p. ix). This relational view of the world emphasises that action results from linking initially disparate elements together, where the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Space is often understood as a form of topology where distance is a function of the intensity of a relation (Müller 2015). It is yet another move away from classical sociological thought about social forces, so be it discourses or production forces, gender or neoliberal economics, there is no ‘external’ to the assembly or network. These ‘forces’ are elements, or actants, within the assembly to be explored and understood, rather than black-boxed powers that can explain something that is either observed or experienced. Alaimo (2011) links her thoughts on transcorporeal materiality to both feminism and risk theory, and demonstrates that bodies are relevant in the analysis of environmental challenges not just as discursive constructions or as material ‘stuff’, but are trans-material—inseparable from the environment. Transcorporeal materiality is a conception of the body that is neither essentialist nor genetically determined, or firmly bounded, but rather a body in which social power and material or geographic agencies intra-act (see also Barad 1996). ‘Trans’ represents the movement across bodies and reveals the interconnections between more or less everything, and thus also across space and time in terms of, for example, ecological systems. In this way, it opens up a theoretical discussion across disciplines such as feminist theory, environmental theories, and science studies (Alaimo 2011). New materialism, particularly the work of Braidotti and Barad can be seen as a new feminist materialism, not least influenced by Haraway’s materialist-semiotic philosophy, which describes human’s colonisation and appropriation of nature and non-humans (Haraway 1992). For some, new materialism takes over where poststructural thought about gender and matter, or sex, in terms of performativity

goes beyond the material. Moreover, the flat ontology, by laying everything, human and non-human, body and mind, and so forth, in a single plane is said to achieve non-dominative effects; hence, power cannot be upheld because there are no hierarchies. Following Haraway, van der Tuijn (2014, p. 234) argues that a diffractive (past-presentfuture relationality) understanding of bodies makes it impossible to understand them according to patriarchy alone; instead, the body includes, for example, patriarchy, feminism, pain, and desire. What we find here is the return of Althusser’s interpellation into subject positions, which Haraway makes use of in her development of cyborg subject positions (van der Tuijn 2014, p. 240). However, unlike Althusser, the new materialist reading of interpellation extends beyond human subjectivity and also includes non-humans. In this line of reasoning, the subject who is hailed into existence by the interpellation responds before the interpellation is cognitively processed, that is, the individual is ‘always already’ (Derrida 1997/1967) a subject, since we respond before we are thought to be in the position to respond. According to van der Tuijn (2014, p. 241), Althusser should have reframed some of his arguments about ideology close to the end of his life. According to his views, the individual becomes subjectified. He claimed that interpellation is based on a diversity of ideologies, which the individual is faced with at once, comparable with intersectional thinking. So, in the moment of interpellation, the subject (human, nonhuman, and trans-human), always already possessions a multitude of intersecting subject positions, an assemblage of relations between humans and non-humans, as well as the past, present, and future. Needless to say, there are critics, both from researchers with similar standpoints and from other perspectives, that question the framework, not least the flat ontology in terms of not recognising certain human capacities that particularly non-animal elements do not possess, such as thinking and having intentions that are pursued. Another common criticism is related to the difficulty in determining what constitutes an assemblage, or a network and its associations, and that the analysis then becomes endless chains of associations without ever arriving at anything other than a network description. Furthermore, by discarding social forces or context, some of the dominant streams of thought, such as ANT, tend to pay less attention to power differentials in assemblages

as well as who or what is at all considered as part of an assembly (Müller 2015). However, we agree with this critique to the extent that there are elements within new materialism that we find useful for intersectional risk theory. Assemblages and ANT have already been applied as theoretical frameworks to empirical examinations of a number of different risk-related fields such as environment, biosecurity, technological deployment, and global health (Brown et al. 2012). We want to transcend the thought traditions in the new materialism movement, escaping easy classification in terms of theory and method, and move concepts such as assemblage and actor-networks into our own theoretical project. The usefulness is obvious when it comes to, for instance, public health studies where the notion of the ‘human’ is opened up and replaced with approaches that recognise the contingent and co-constituted nature of humans as they exist through multiple relationships with bodies, bacteria, the microbiome, and so forth (Cohn and Lynch 2017). It is based on an ambition to seek to understand the ambiguity of being human in their multiple relationships of human and non-human materialities and concerns.

The Material Turn in Studies of Risks It is safe to say that it was in environmental studies that sociologists with an interest in risk first started to explore the notions of the meaning of the material world in terms of both thinking about and investigating environmental issues (Lidskog and Sundqvist 2011). However, already in the mid-1990s ANT began to gain influence in studies of health and medical treatments (Prout 1996). One of the more elaborated theoretical applications of new materialism in risk research is van Loon’s (e.g. 2014) conceptualisation of risk as matter–energy– information flows; since all substance is matter–energy–information and existence comprises such flows, the duality between body and mind is dissolved. According to van Loon (2014, p. 447): ‘risk is performative [and] indistinguishable from the practices through which it comes into being, not because they are “representations” but because they are remediations of associations that they themselves have facilitated’. As such, risk can obtain political potential and accumulate agency, where its containment can itself become risky as well. Science

and technology studies (STS), including feminist techno-science, inspired these early investigations, resulting in well-established STS streams of research on environmental, technological, and health risks, not least in what is now known as posthumanism and ecofeminist studies (Plumwood 2004). In this way, environmental studies have contributed with important conceptual and empirical developments, whereas the human/nature divide has been problematised in relation to gender, vulnerability, and justice. Environmental justice, in particular, has long engaged with questions on unequal distributions of bads, power, gender, class, and race (e.g. Downey and Hawkins 2008). An example in risk research where assembly and STS are applied to enhance risk theory is by Boholm and Corvellec (e.g. 2011, 2015) and their relational understanding of risk. Inspired by Hilgartner (1992) and Latour (2005) amongst others, they highlight the relational assemblage of risk where risk is constructed semantically. This means that risk is always what might happen, never what happens, and is constantly changing, meaning that any single phenomenon can simultaneously be regarded as a risk object, as an object at risk, or as having nothing to do with risk, by observers operating under different assumptions (Boholm and Corvellec 2015, p. 183). Boholm and Corvellec then transform this understanding of risk into a framework where risk objects and objects at risk can be analysed through their interrelations. In the field of risk studies, the concept of assemblage has also been picked up by Deborah Lupton in her work on emotion-risk assemblages and human-app assemblages. She suggests the emotionrisk assemblage as a way to explore the embodied nature of risk understandings by focusing on space, place, and the production of emotions. Lupton (2013) argues that risk is inevitably configured in socio-normative beliefs and processes and in interaction with the bodies of others or with material objects in time-specific and placespecific contexts. Hence, risk is collective and evolving, rather than individual and static, where affinity is created through guilt and shame towards imagined ‘different others’, including past and future generations, artefacts, and material phenomena, living or non-living (Marcus and Saka 2006). The embodied subject experiences the world through the senses and experiences, but never individually, for we constantly relate and respond in interaction with other people.

Similarly, Lupton’s (2013) emotion-risk assembly involves both the impact and constellation of many other elements, such as ideational and material, human and non-human, living and non-living. In this way, our embodied emotion-risk assemblages are a result of our interactions with ‘different others’. Such an approach opens up the possibility of incorporating the material world into the understandings of embodiment and subjectivity, including objects as well as place and space. This means to include the social and political lives of actants and the environment in certain analyses of risk, a kind of integrating ambition that acknowledges the connectedness of these dimensions and the influence of their interactions on the representation, production, and reproduction of risk. In her later work on digital health and digital risk society (Lupton 2016), she draws on van Loon’s (2014) conceptualisation of digital risk assemblages, which recognises the relational, multiple, and constant influx of technical and human hybrids (Lupton 2016, p. 302), and on feminist scholars such as Bennett (2004) in her conceptualisation of human-app assemblages. These technohuman assemblages, invested with thing-power, are entangled with experiences of embodiment health as well as selfhood, and social relations in everyday life—for example when women use weight control apps or other health apps (Lupton 2018). There are critical voices in the field of risk and particularly environmental sociology. For example, Pellizzoni (2016) raises a concern that the celebration of self-organising nature (e.g. Braidotti 2013), and the dissolution of boundaries between humans and nonhumans (e.g. Latour 2005), become tools in the hands of actors with particular standpoints and agendas, and concepts such as resilience and system adaptation are in concord with new materialism, which create a basis for contingent neoliberal, capitalist, and antienvironmental governance (even though this is opposed to the predominant anti-capitalist position held by many new materialist scholars). Instead, Pellizzoni (2016) in his analysis of the possibilities for environmental sociology to ‘turn’ to the new materialism argues in favor for the ‘old’ materialism. Theodor Adorno, for instance, still has much to offer for a non-dualistic understanding of the environment. Hence, thinking is already a doing, and the relationship between thinking and praxis is paradoxical since they are neither possible to

merge nor are they unconditionally different (see also Cook 2006). However, this is not the kind of flat, or monist, ontology that is found in new materialism. Although ‘new materialism’ can be considered a critical line of thought, it is not in the sense of (historical) materialism that stemmed from Marx and was developed by the Frankfurt school. To sum up, although the material turn is traceable in risk research, in some areas this theoretical framework is already well established whilst in others, it is still developing and growing. However, there are only a few fields of risk research where attention to how complex networks interact comes with an analytical angle on uneven power relations (Brown et al. 2012). Thus, there is a tendency where even with a number of distinguished female thinkers, who more or less all address questions about gender, patriarchy, inequality, and/or Western domination, these questions are not always included in studies performing materialist analysis of risk (or other issues, for that matter).

Assemblages of Posthumans at Risk Intersectional risk analysis shows that risk is constituted and produced in social and geographic spaces, as well as the various power relations that prevail there, as in, for example, studies of the mediating and constitutive role of security objects. Approaching the intersections of social identities, practices, and materialities in shaping networks of health, environmental, technological, infrastructural, and territorialised risks can help us disentangle the role of a certain object in shaping social relations of inequality and how they relate to risk objects (cf. Boholm and Corvellec 2011). The black box described by Callon and Latour (1981, p, 285) adds a metaphor for how processes such as these become naturalised or are made invisible by the very idea of how a society functions today—a simple example being the current phenomenon of global terrorist threats and the accompanying security systems oriented towards particular subjects and religious beliefs: ‘An actor grows with the number of relations he or she can put, as we say, in black boxes. A black box contains that which no longer needs to be considered, those things whose contents have become a matter of indifference. The more elements one can place in black boxes – modes of thoughts, habits, forces and objects – the broader the construction

one can raise.’ Such an analysis requires us to trace what is reassembled under the umbrella of risk, where associations can be operationalised using the concepts closure and stabilisation (Latour 2005). A closure of risk means that social perceptions become more similar and a specific phenomenon in a specific social context, over time, becomes a matter of fact (a black box), as when an association between terrorism and Islam is established, to such degree that it is no longer necessary to articulate the relation between terrorism and Islam, and being a Muslim is in the eyes of others perceived as a potential l terrorists. However, ANT does not by default include a feminist or power analysis and therefore it is important for our purposes also to include ecofeminist thinkers. Empirical analyses that apply ecofeminism or feminist political ecology are found in a variety of areas that are implicitly related to risk, such as water management (e.g. Ajibade et al. 2013), nuclear power accidents (e.g. Kimura and Katano 2014), and climate change adaptation (e.g. Sultana 2014). Ecofeminist thinkers have explored conceptual and cultural connections between women and nature and applied feminist power analyses, including the analysis of multiple disadvantage (Cudworth 2005), offering a potential means of taking power differentials along the lines of humans/nature into account (compare Lykke 2010). Much feminist and ecofeminist philosophical critique has focused on mind/body dualism and the denial of embodiment as the key background for the environmental failure of Western culture. Reflections on how these power relations are intertwined or entangled with capitalism, racism, and patriarchy may destabilise and challenge techno-science approaches and contribute with important knowledge on how the exploitation of earth-others is intertwined and sustained (Van der Tuin and Dolphijn 2010). This critique has also been directed towards the human-centred feminism that has dominated feminist thinking in recent decades, and ecofeminist theorists have not been adequately recognised for their valuable contributions to the understanding of the intersections of power, including nature (Gaard 2011; Lykke 2010; Plumwood 2004). Lately, ecofeminism has begun to touch upon intersectionality more explicitly by stressing the importance of including multiple inequalities, as well as privilege, within its scope (Gaard 2015; Kaijser and Kronsell 2014). At the same

time, there is also a growing criticism within the field of gender studies for the tendency to not include ecocritical feminist thought regarding non-human actors, such as ‘posthumans’ or ‘earth-others’ (Haraway 1992; Plumwood 1993), in intersectionality and for treating ecofeminism as a subfield of feminist studies rather than integrating it (Lykke 2010, p. 81). This indicates that intersectional scholars have not problematised the role of the environment in current society and how it has become an integral part of both governance and everyday life (Lykke 2010). What would it mean to do an intersectional risk analysis of risk networks? In the following section, we use a few previous studies as illustrative examples. Climate change risks can serve as one example to illustrate how intersectional analysis can entangle contemporary operationalisations of climate change-configured risk in relation to the existing structures of power. Often, when shaped by the natural sciences and Western technocratic perspectives (e.g. Jasanoff 2005; Cannon and Müller-Mahn 2010), the discursive construction of risks tends to render invisible how interwoven structures of power are with issues of, for instance, resource extraction, governance, and climate change adaptation. Climate change and environmental challenges, in general, are intimately related to structures of power globally and locally in policy and governance, as well as in everyday life. The location of agency in the hybridity of relational nature-culture collectives provides a conceptual repertoire that is rich in the possibility of addressing the intrinsically hybrid metabolic and corporeal questions of networks. Another example is biomedical risks. Battle (2012) shows how race, difference, and risk are entangled in developments of treatment, genomic science, and research priorities concerning Type 2 diabetes, and how the technological and scientific expansion of medical practice, by examining how glucometer and other diabetes technologies are embedded within new social forms and emergent practices, are transformative of both medicine and patients. Over time, in the United States, diabetic risk has become racialised and African Americans are seen as a desirable research population. Battle (2012) particularly analyses the ways in which the translational process from clinical objectivity to rational patient/consumer behaviour, illuminating the role of the industry, scientific, and medical consumer stakeholder

networks in redefining not only the illness but also the very categories of patient, consumer, and citizen. The study reveals how diagnostic technologies claim to speak for what the organ can and cannot do, or rather, what has happened to the organ (the pancreas). Glucometers purport to speak for what the organ is doing or has recently done. Diabetes risk scores claim to speak for a pancreas that has not yet contemplated pathological action. Public health understandings and outreach efforts are based on the translated interpretations of a racialised pancreas indexed by risk, showing the role of race in the development of diabetes technologies that move the epidemiological clock backwards in time, from diagnosis to risk prediction of the asymptomatic individual. Through historical scientific narratives about blood, cells, genes, and now genomes, racial and biological categories refract these truth claims about the body through shifting interpretations of both risk and relatedness (Battle 2012). The shift in the evaluative approach towards Type 2 diabetes categorically gazes upon the body (such as through the prism of race, ethnicity, phenotype, genotype, etc.). In combination with new tests, such as blood glucometer technologies, or mathematical rationalities, the new approach offers new interpretive schemata for Type 2 diabetes factmaking. As such, diabetes measurement technologies, whether diagnostic or predictive, arguably function as interpretive device technologies within changing temporal and biomedical classificatory schemata and understandings. Thus, researchers in the field of genetics, by analysing the precise location and definition of the genome also place ‘Africa’ in the human genome, producing a pathological genetic Africa that deepens racial stigmatisation and narratives of difference. Furthermore, in studies of risk objects (or networks), such as in the field of human security, human security comprises ad hoc complexes or assemblages of ‘men and things’ in which material objects, just like human beings, play a constitutive role (Foucault 2007, p. 96). Voelkner (2010) uses such thinking to show how the constitutive role of human– non-human alliances gives concrete form to human security strategies and effects but also, importantly, the inherently contingent and precarious nature of these effects. This means that instead of thinking of non-humans as the passive background setting of human security

practices, one should view them as performative actants that are part of shaping these practices. With examples of Burmese migrants in Thailand, Voelkner shows that the security objects of pathogenic circulation had the effect of generating a shift in the relations, subjectivities, and institutions of the Burmese communities and the Thai state. These objects are often developed elsewhere and dropped by the circuits of global human security governance, and as such, are also part of colonial practices. These important power effects were both produced by and reliant on the interrelations between the human and non-human elements that helped set up the migrant health assemblage in Thailand. It is here, in the extension of the complexity and scope of collectives, and the related potential to dominate and exploit others, that this perspective assumes importance. Risk networks are then understood as an expression of translation processes, a generic term for the various formative steps taken to align and bind actors, actants, and environment in risk assemblages (Lupton 2013). Close to this way of thinking is also queer scholar Jasbir Puar (2007), who challenges the naturalisation of spatial constructs and borders and the constantly re-centring of the West and Europe as the progressive centre of democracy. In her book Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Puar creates a dialogue between divergent theoretical fields, detecting resonances and sympathies even at the points where they appear as most contradictory. One of her aims is to rethink intersectionality and identity by analysing sexuality as part of an assemblage of representations, bodies, and movements. Although intersectionality and assemblage are not analogous and at times are posed as incompatible or oppositional, Puar tries to think them through and with each other, not in order to harmonise conflicting lines or pose them as either-or, but rather to put them in a productive conversation with each other. As for the tension between viewing how societies of control produce bodies through ‘matter that functions predominately through signification’ and the production of identity positions through acts of interpellation, Puar argues: There are different conceptual problems posed by each; intersectionality attempts to comprehend political institutions and their attendant forms of social normativity and disciplinary

administration, whilst assemblages, in an effort to re-introduce politics into the political, asks what is prior to and beyond what gets established. So it seems to me that one of the big payoffs for thinking through the intertwined relations of intersectionality and assemblages is that it can help us produce more roadmaps of precisely these not quite fully understood relations between discipline and control. (Puar 2017, p. 606) Following Puar, as stated in the quote above, we believe that it could be productive for intersectional analysis of risk and inequality to be informed by some of the developments within the field of new materialism and posthumanism. Similarly, intersectionality informs the material turn by to some degree ‘unflatten’ the flat ontology of new materialism by introducing the intra-actions not only within assemblies but also within assemblies that are intersectionally gendered, racified, and classed. For example, the human-app or online assemblage monitoring health, signified as various risks (Lupton 2018), includes not only gendered but also raced and classed discourses that together with, for example, technology and risks act intersectionally with body and mind of the users (Montelius forthcoming).

Conclusions It is with a kind of ambivalence that we have included a discussion on the materialist turn in this book. On the one hand, intersectional analysis of risk needs to include ideas on networks, assemblages, and materialism be able to recognise the importance of the physical corporeal world just as well as the discursive. Doing so acknowledges that the relationality of our precarity (Butler 2004), shared across the world, should also include an analysis of the material surroundings. On the other hand, intersectional risk theory honours epistemology, visuality, and representation. Thus, the focus of new materialism on ontology and fluidity without notions of social structures is not entirely in line with our intersectional perspective, but can bring about a much needed analysis of the taken for granted, what is black-boxed, in the gendered, raced, and classed interactions between humans and nonhumans as well as the corporeal social-natural processes in everyday

life. So, if we are to understand the workings of power (and resistance to power) from a new materialist perspective, we need to research its operations locally and micro-politically and not only structurally. Rather than ‘explaining’ social processes by claiming the workings of structural or systemic power, this requires a focus on events, actions, and intra-actions between assembled relations. Power needs to be treated as a transient and fluctuating phenomenon—a momentary exercise by one relation over another. As stated in Chap. 1, we believe in the notion that individual actors and society (or structures) that fit together must be problematised. However, this cannot be accomplished by emphasising either the freedom of individual actors or structural determination (O’Malley 2009); instead, we argue that we should theoretically engage with ideas that embrace ambivalence and inconstancy, structure and agency, as well as discourses and experiences. This perspective also acknowledges the fluidity and complexity of current individualised and globalised societies without hiding the intersecting hegemonic structures of power. Societies need to be understood and explained using ambivalent and shifting perspectives that are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and, if they are, they may simply need to be understood as coexisting.

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© The Author(s) 2020 K. Giritli Nygren et al., A Framework of Intersectional Risk Theory in the Age of Ambivalence, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33524-3_8

8. Methodological Applications Katarina Giritli Nygren1   , Anna Olofsson1   and Susanna Öhman1   (1) Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall and Östersund, Sweden

 

  Katarina Giritli Nygren (Corresponding author) Email: [email protected]   Anna Olofsson Email: [email protected]   Susanna Öhman Email: [email protected] Keywords Methodology – Risk – Intersectional analysis – Structureagency

Introduction As discussed in previous chapters, we believe that intersectional explorations of risk could and should be done in various ways, at different levels of abstraction, from different standpoints and in different contexts. Or as Bourdieu points out (cited in Everett 2002, p. 56): ‘one may adopt any or “all the techniques that are relevant and practically usable”, whether those techniques are “hard” or whether they are “fuzzy-wuzzy”’. His research motto is simply that ‘the only thing that is forbidden is to forbid’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 227). With this as a point of departure, it can be said that a multitude of angles points to the necessity for multiple methods as well. To explore

and uncover how risk is intertwined with structural power and inequality, our aim in this chapter is to show how intersectional risk theory can be applied in empirical investigations using different methods by interrogating the implicit methodological assumptions and ambivalent knowledge position. We must also interrogate using methods and methodologies in a similar way as we have done with our theoretical assumptions. Thus, to understand and explain any society, we need to employ ambivalent and shifting perspectives that are not necessarily mutually exclusive or may simply need to be understood as coexisting. This entails ambivalence, invoking certainty and uncertainty, as well as structure and agency. Intersectional risk research necessarily involves more than one method. Just as qualitative methods serve to illuminate individual experiences of risk, life trajectories, and discrimination, quantitative methods can identify relevant structures and effects at societal or global levels. We will argue in favour of the need to evaluate a given method’s epistemological assumptions, how it is practised and, perhaps most importantly, how its results are interpreted (Harnois 2013; Sprague 2005). According to Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall, intersectionality is ‘best framed as an analytic sensibility’ (2013, p. 795), emphasising how intersectional analysis can be used to capture the relational aspects of categories, identities, and positions: what makes an analysis intersectional—whatever terms it deploys, whatever its iteration, whatever its field or discipline— is its adoption of an intersectional way of thinking about the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to power. This framing—conceiving of categories not as distinct but as always permeated by other categories, fluid and changing, always in the process of creating and being created by dynamics of power—emphasizes what intersectionality does rather than what intersectionality is. (Cho et al. 2013, p. 795) As indicated by the quote above, performing intersectional analysis means acknowledging the fluidity and complexity of existing individualised and globalised societies without neglecting the intersecting hegemonic structures of power. In the following section,

we will present examples of how we have applied intersectional risk theory in our own research. For the sake of simplicity, we have divided our presentation into a broad distinction between interpretative and quantitative research strategies. Whilst the former aligns well with the critical and feminist origins of our theoretical framework, further discussion is necessary for the latter approach since quantitative research strategies are common in risk research but are often rejected by critical, poststructural, and feminist scholars.

Interpreting Risk: Discourses and Practices Taking interpretative intersectional analysis as a starting point, riskrelated discourse as well as everyday understandings and practices can be explored and understood more fully. Studying risk in this way means employing qualitative analysis to explore the multiple ways in which it is used as well as its consequences. Choo and Ferree (2010) distinguish between three ways of understanding intersectionality: group centred, process centred, and system centred. In their view, most empirical intersectional studies are group-centred, looking at multiply marginalised groups and their perspectives and theorising the ways in which lived experiences of oppression cannot be separated into single issues of class, race, and gender. This way of understanding intersectionality is closely related to standpoint theory, which is sometimes associated with projects aiming to give voice to marginalised and silenced groups, focusing, in particular, on differences in experiences within a given category (cf. the theoretical discussions in Chaps. 5 and 6). The process-centred approach views intersectionality as a process and power as relational, focusing particularly on how interactions between variables multiply oppressions. This is also the form of analysis in which categories are most clearly questioned and alternative forms of analysis are developed (cf. the theoretical discussions in Chaps. 6 and 7). Finally, system-centred intersectionality studies treat intersectionality as a complex system in which gender and race are embedded in the framework of global capitalism—ownership, profit, and the commodification of labour—and seek to identify local and historically particular regimes of inequality (cf. the theoretical discussions in Chaps. 3 and 4). These three approaches are not

mutually exclusive, although our own applications tend to be either group centred or system centred, with some elements of processcentred analysis. In order to exemplify how interpretative applications of intersectional risk theory could be performed, we will in the following sections show how we have tried to open up the ‘doing gender’ framework through group-centred analysis to create a space for rethinking calculations of risk as lived experience and how these intersect with gender, class, sexuality, or race. We will also exemplify how system-centred analysis could be performed to explore the expression, signification, and operation of risk as a control mechanism.

Example of Group-centred Analysis Turning to methodological applications used in group-centred intersectional studies, we will use as our example a focus group study of how people who identify as LGBTQIA perceive risk in their daily lives (Giritli Nygren et al. 2016). Exploring an individual’s understanding of risk refers to investigating his or her embeddedness in his or her dayto-day experiences involving his or her family, friends, and work colleagues, physical setting, and community relations. We used focus group interviews to facilitate an analysis of the social processes involved in the production of collective meaning and therefore we only used open-ended questions to ask what interviewees thought about risk. As Morgan (1988, p. 12) argues, the focus groups enabled us to use ‘group interaction to produce data and insights that would be less accessible without the interaction found in a group’. The conversation broadens perspectives on the topic as participants express their views, listen to others, and reflect on their own experiences. In our study, the respondents spoke as freely as they wanted to. Whilst this sometimes resulted in a discussion of unexpected issues, it was possible to capture their own descriptions, words, and associations rather than merely reformulating their experiences in theoretical language. Each interview began with the open question: What comes to mind when you hear the word ‘risk’? When encouraged to discuss this, the participants began to speak openly. A range of different risk objects were referred to in the discussion; then, someone in the group would mention the kinds of risks they

perceived to be associated with sexual minorities—or, as one of the participants put it, ‘gay risks’. Our findings showed how the risk objects that the participants talked about were intercut with gender, sexuality, and other power relations dependent on time and place. In our analysis we identified three areas associated with particular forms of doing and undoing risk: violence, threats, and harassment in public places; institutional discrimination, mistreatment, and disadvantage; and emotional and relational loss and isolation in one’s private life. As participant risk is ever present for LGBT people; from the moment they make their sexual preferences clear and stop trying to conform to heteronormative expectations, they are at risk of exposure to ignorance, discrimination, and/or violence. In a heteronormative society, fear of violence and discrimination drives their particular everyday behaviours that become embodied and automatic over time as part of the self. The risks to which any individual is subjected because of their sexual orientation depend on the extent to which that orientation is exposed (see also Borgström 2011; Tiby 1999). The participants talked about how they sometimes do not acknowledge the gender of their partner and that, in a heteronormative context, passing as heterosexual is intimately related to avoiding risk. However, avoiding risk was not the only force at work here; they also talked about how to not be exposed to such risks and the possibilities of undoing risk in spaces that are not overly controlled or governed by heteronormativity. Separatist rooms were talked of as some kind of ‘resistance’ in order to reclaim the right not to be ‘at risk’. This ‘undoing’ is not designed to avoid whatever is seen as a risk; in the interviews, much of the discussion concerned how risk was circumvented—for example, by passing as heterosexual or by avoiding certain places. Rather, the aim is to lay claim to what ought to be a right: the right to be treated as an equal, just like ‘everyone else’. Sometimes, taking a greater risk and challenging norms can be understood as a way of undoing risk, or perhaps redoing risk, so as not to always be scared and risk conscious. To reveal one’s sexuality publicly when it does not accord with prevailing norms may be experienced as an enjoyable protest or demonstration (cf. Lupton 2015). We find such ‘undoing’ practices in efforts to maintain eye contact with a potential attacker, to wear a wig and heels in a hostile

neighbourhood, or to hold hands in a public place. This kind of groupcentred approach can extend our understanding of the structural and interactional processes involved in the production of risk and inequality and how they are contested, reconstituted, and negotiated in everyday life. To sum up, the empirical examples presented in relation to the interpretative approach illustrate some different ways of analysing risk. By thinking of risk as performative and/or performance, it becomes possible to distinguish between discourses of risk to which we are subjected and how we subjectively invest in, reject, or negotiate these discourses in relation to each other. The group-centred example serves to illustrate how people try to manage and make sense of the risk they face in their everyday life.

Examples of System-centred Analysis As discussed in Chaps. 3 and 4, cultural institutions and discourses define and produce the objects of our knowledge, governing the way in which a topic can be talked about meaningfully; as such, they rule out, limit, and restrict other ways of talking. By tracing discourses it is possible to examine what is understood or taken for granted—in other words, what is discursively normalised, and what is silenced or hidden through this normalisation (Fahlgren et al. 2016). This perspective invites questions about how notions of risk come to ‘delimit what it is possible to think and say at a particular time, what purpose does this serve, and to whose benefit’ (Wardman 2008, p. 1633). To challenge or destabilise the processes and effects of normalisation, the primary task is to make these transparent in order to facilitate new discussions and new stories. Discursive readings of risk and normalisation processes serve as an analytical tool to capture the processes that define and produce what is considered ‘natural’ or right, simultaneously producing inequalities. The ‘language of risk’ can then be explored as a discursive imperative, underwritten by its attendant values and beliefs. Close and careful readings of what seems obvious can expose the particular conditions to show that nothing is inevitably given, and the implications can be discussed in terms that the discourses and discursive practices either reproduce and/or challenge.

We will illustrate this approach through two examples. The first of these is a study of Swedish policy for the Arctic (Nyhlén et al. 2018); the second is a study of the media reporting of a wildfire in Sweden during the summer of 2014 (Öhman et al. 2016). The first study was inspired by Carol Bacchi’s critical policy approach, viewing policy creation as an important instrument of control that requires analysis and discussion, rather than as something to be viewed as ‘neutral’ or taken for granted. In addition to analysing the policy solutions advanced by politicians and officials, researchers must also seek to explicate the assumptions on which the problem is formulated by focusing on what is represented as ‘the problem’ in a given case—for example, the risks that have to be managed (Nyhlén et al. 2018). It is also important to analyse what remains unproblematised, and whether it is possible to approach ‘the problem’ in some other way. Critical policy analysis works well with intersectional feminist risk analysis because it shows that policy is not a means of ‘fixing’ an existing ‘problem’ but is part of the ‘doing’ of social reality. Our postcolonial and feminist intersectional interpretations and analyses showed that Sweden’s strategy for the Arctic region was based on a traditional security paradigm and a scientific nationalism, and that sustainability was used as a mobilising metaphor to motivate Swedish involvement, based on the historic, contemporary, and future excellence of Swedish research. At the same time, the policy document framed sustainability in such a way that it concealed the paradoxes inherent in the strategy’s priorities, involving conflicts between climate change, extraction of natural fossil resources, and health and living conditions in the Arctic. In this way, sustainability also masked threats to the security of local human populations. Extracting the desired resources poses risks for the environment and for society, ignoring the growing interest of the region’s inhabitants in autonomy and independence. By focusing on risks and benefits, claims other than the strictly traditional concerns about reindeer husbandry and wildlife hunting (which also legitimise Sweden’s position in the Arctic) are effectively hidden. Thus, the policy enacts exploitation by echoing the language used in stories on science, conquest, and colonial exploration that were written centuries ago, framing the risks in terms of the scientifically derived enabling discourses of sustainability.

We also identified ongoing iterations of what previous research has characterised as ‘masculine fantasies’, enabling particular positions for actors in the Arctic region. These practices are based on state-of-the-art research; although recognising the knowledge of the Sámi people, this is presented as being ‘at risk’ of extinction and in need of support by Swedish science and technology. In this way, Sweden claims influence both as an Arctic country cooperating with its Nordic neighbours and as a leading research nation that can manage the risks of climate change and exploitation of land and resources. The sustainable management of these risks and security threats through research also constructs Sweden as a leading research nation in the world, whilst the Arctic becomes a resource-rich open space that can meet a neoliberal economy’s need for growth, as well as the desire for exploration and conquest. In the Arctic, discourses of risk facilitate exploitation because risk permeates understandings of the Arctic and its inhabitants, and risks always need to be managed, at the same time concealing structures of power and inequality. By shifting the focus to risk and sustainability, questions of land and constitutive rights are efficiently concealed, as are the prevailing conceptualisations of the region and their implications. Additionally, the entanglement of nationalist scientific, policy, and business interests enacted in the sustainability metaphor silences other voices in the Arctic. The colonisation of Sápmi is described as if it was conducted in a historical context, although ongoing colonial practices can be traced in the document. In the past, colonialism was enacted through the exploration of ‘new’ parts of the world and exploitation of resources, humans, and research. Now, Swedish policy similarly legitimises land and resource exploitation through the discourse of sustainable development enabled by outstanding research, technology, and knowledge. The circle closes when scientific knowledge and sustainability in the Arctic region become colonial practices, dressed in the robes of risk management and security. Our second example exposes the relationships between discursive practices, events, and texts in news media reporting of a wildfire, and how these arise out of and are shaped by power relationships. In this case, we were inspired by Fairclough’s (1995) critical discourse

analysis, which draws principally on social constructivism. He argues that people use language to create the social world in which they live, and from this perspective, texts and spoken statements are viewed as social actions. Following this line of argument, we treated the journalists’ articles and statements as social actions which meant that the discourses themselves, rather than the documents and individual statements, became the principal subject of analysis. Proceeding from questions about ‘values’, ‘power’, ‘creation of meaning’, and ‘legitimacy’, the focus shifted to the value systems through which meanings are ascribed to a crisis or disaster; the forms of understanding used to legitimise crises; and the consequences for different societal actors (Öhman et al. 2016). In adopting this perspective, we also sought to identify the forms of knowledge that take priority over others and how discursive practices are intertwined with structures of power at different societal levels. Within the sample of 161 articles, we identified four main discourses through which the crisis was communicated: two intertwined discourses of risk, a gendered discourse of the hero, and one discourse of rurality. Our analysis confirmed that whilst the different newspapers were communicating and reporting the wildfire, they were also doing risk. A number of reports portrayed certain actors as heroes fighting the fire. The relationship between an embodied heroic practice and the metaphorical or imaginative experience of overcoming fear involves imagination, metaphor, and desire, as well as knowledge of oneself as positioned in certain ways within the culture. Whilst the risks taken by all of the male heroes were embedded in a language of danger, sweat, and tears (denied by the heroes themselves), the female ‘heroes’ were portrayed through a language of caring, helping, and supportive actions such as cooking and arranging supplies. Clearly, these descriptions and images reflect and reproduce the culturally different status and qualities associated with femininity and masculinity. The ‘periphery’ where the wildfire occurred was portrayed in many of the articles through the lens of the centre. Portraying the periphery as lagging behind the superior centre, the media reproduced discourses of rurality in terms of differences in the ‘doing’ of risk. In summary, the system-centred examples revealed how it is possible to research the way in which discourses of risk are entangled

with the different structures of power and how this gives rise to specific subject positions, for example the Sámi population within a colonial and nationalist discourse. When we turn to critical quantitative analysis, we will revisit the system-centred analysis.

Using Quantitative Data to Address Critical Questions on Risk Empirical studies on risk commonly employ large sets of quantitative data to interpret people’s perceptions, behavioural intentions, or previous experiences. Quantitative methodologies can identify possible intersections of risk and inequality (including both privilege and vulnerability) and their effects at group and community levels (Curran 2016). Whilst the epistemological underpinnings of such studies differ significantly from critical and feminist theories, empirical studies increasingly use intersectional theory to design quantitative research or for hypothesis testing, especially in studies on health and illness (Giritli Nygren and Olofsson 2014). Before discussing some of these studies, it seems useful to revisit our own epistemological foundations and the theories that inform our own understandings of risk and inequality. Our theoretical base is critical feminist theory, which has its origins in poststructuralism and neo-Marxist thinking. One of the main tenets of poststructuralism is a critique of positivism and quantitative research, and indeed empirical research, based on the view that a universal social science is impossible for several reasons: First of all, since there is no possibility of objectivism or representation without presumption, all knowledge is contextualised by its historical and cultural nature (Agger 1991). Second, so-called subject positions cannot be measured against each other; on the contrary, different experiences are framed by discourse and practices at a given historical moment. Third, as researchers, we must account for social experiences from these multiple perspectives rather than inferring general principles of social structure and organisation. Therefore, science cannot be spoken in a singular universal voice; instead, it should reflect

a variety of positions from which ordinary people can speak knowledgeably about the world. Whilst potentially relinquishing the global perspective of the Enlightenment, including Marxism, this too can be deconstructed as the particularistic posture of Eurocentric rationality, incorporating biases of class, race, and gender (Agger 1991). Intersectional risk theory also subscribes to the deconstruction of monolithic knowledge claims, challenging singular methodologies (whether quantitative or qualitative) in favour of multiple methodologies, and multiple class, race, and gender perspectives to investigate their intersections with risk. Amongst multiple methodologies, we include quantitative approaches, but this path is crooked and sometimes difficult to navigate. We need to find concepts and methods that can be statistically quantified without concealing or violating what risk ‘does’ in the individual’s everyday life and in society at large (Öhman et al. 2018). To that end, we looked to those who have walked the path before us and asked whether quantitative data can be used to answer critical questions (Sprague 2005). These ‘quantitative criticalists’ (Stage and Wells 2014) seek to depolarise the qualitative and the quantitative to learn from critical research, regardless of method. They note the difference between positivist methodology and a variety of available methods as empirical techniques (see Sprague 2005). We find this distinction quite important, since it enables the use of particular techniques without necessarily adhering to a specific epistemology, and we will soon return to this distinction again. Rather than striving to prove the relevance of grand theories, critical quantitative research seeks to reveal inequities and the social or institutional factors that create and perpetuate them (McLaren 2017). Critical quantitative scholarship also questions the measures and analytical practices deployed in quantitative research to ensure that these represent circumstances and contexts adequately, rather than inadvertently perpetuating exclusion and hierarchy (McLaren 2017). We are especially inspired by Sprague (2005) who, as a feminist quantitative standpoint researcher, advocates that the knowledge social scientists create should offer an alternative to the hegemonic view and so empower the disadvantaged.

Clearly, the relationship between intersectionality theory and quantitative research cannot match the compatibility of intersectional and qualitative methods, described by Shields (2008, p. 306) as ‘always already necessary to one another’. The key challenge for quantitative applications relates to methodology rather than to methods, in the epistemological incommensurability of positivism and hermeneutics. The positivist tradition cherishes ‘objectivity’ and pursues ‘truth’, viewing bias as avoidable and ‘interests’ or norms as beyond the domain of scientific inquiry. However, Sprague (2005) contends that it is possible to use quantitative methods without adhering to positivism; to make fruitful use of all available methods, we need to separate methodology from method. As we have argued elsewhere (Giritli Nygren and Olofsson 2014), care is needed in advancing the scientific craft associated with quantitative design and analyses, including how questions are formulated, how available data is used, and what statistical methods are selected. In this regard, new measures, variables, and analytic approaches must be developed, grounded in critical and intersectional epistemology (Sprague 2005), rather than reusing available data not designed to adhere to a critical analysis. However, Sprague (2005, p. 81) points out that many of these criticisms —in her example from feminist research (but true of other critical research as well)—are really aimed at positivism more broadly, where opponents are descending from a critique against a specific methodology to a dismissal of a whole class of methods. Another similarly all-compassing critique is that critical quantitative approaches can never truly represent a critical theoretical perspective such as intersectionality because only transformative, action-oriented methods are critical (Pasque et al. 2011) Thus, the supposed non-transformative nature of most critical quantitative research implies that no inquiry is critical that does not essentially employ some type of action research design, which also means that the vast majority of critical qualitative research does not live up to the definition of ‘critical’ either. This debate is important. But it is even more vital to further develop critical research, both quantitative and qualitative, that reveals inequity, unfairness, and triggers action (see Stage and Wells 2014). Increasingly, empirical studies in the field of critical quantitative research incorporate intersectionality (Jang 2018). However, much of this work

employs intersectionality as a perspective on research rather than as a theory that drives the research question—that is, it fails to ask the ‘how’ question or to integrate the idea of mutually constituted categories into the work (Giritli Nygren and Olofsson 2014). Intersectionality tends to be viewed in terms of social categories or positions that are treated more like independent factors within a conventional factorial research design, than as reciprocally instituted and hierarchically ordered (Bowleg 2008). There are some exceptions; for example, ‘critical race quantitative intersectionality’ (Covarrubias and Vélez 2013) utilises quantitative methods to account for the material impact of race and racism at its intersection with other forms of subordination, and works towards identifying and challenging possible quantitative methods for intersectional analyses (see also López et al. 2018). Such approaches also challenge the view that quantitative data are ‘neutral’, asserting instead that numbers can be used to reveal power and to empower the disadvantaged (Gillborn et al. 2018). Intersectional studies deconstruct analytical categories and question categorisation because it (re)produces existing understandings and the gendered and situated expression of risk. However, some categorisation may be necessary for the purposes of empirical analysis both in interpretative and quantitative analyses. The question, then, is how to categorise without reproducing (unequal) social structures and at the same time (re)configuring the status quo. One solution is to treat categories as neither natural nor given, asserting, for example, that gender and race are not pre-existing or fixed categories but, instead, are practices that depend on time and context. On this view, ‘categories’ are historically institutionalised positions, interlocked and positioned through social relations and acquiring meaning through their relationship to each other (Walby et al. 2012; cf. McCall 2005). Interpretations of categorisations should not refer to causation but to the association between position and inequality (Jang 2018). However, if gender, race, and class are dynamic, relational, time-dependent, and space-dependent positions, how can we ever hope to measure this elusive web? The institutionalisation of positions in social structures often provides a degree of stability relative to the experience of risk and uncertainty. Fluidity still exists,

since as social institutions change, so does the environment within which specific sets of lived experiences are negotiated.

From Methodology to Methods Based on the discussion so far, it is clear that intersectional risk analyses can also be done quantitatively. Theoretically, this is in line with system-centred intersectionality studies, mentioned earlier in this chapter, thus focusing on intercategorical complexity (McCall 2001). This approach accepts categorisation, for instance of genders, and investigates the relationships between categories, or social groups, or intersectional risk regimes (cf. the theoretical discussions in Chaps. 3 and 4). In risk research most empirical studies make use of individual perception or behaviour through registers, surveys, and experiments, but text and linguistic analyses have become more popular. Making use of individual accounts or behaviour in quantitative intersectional analysis of risk can be seen as performing the performative (cf. the theoretical discussions in Chaps. 4 and 5). Thus, although analyses are based on individual data, the aim is to find how social structures, such as norms which the individual is interpellated to act according to, are expressed by the individual. Analyses of texts, produced by mass media or other kind of media, policy documents, or historical accounts can also be of interest for an intersectional analysis of risk. Just as in the case of interpretative analyses, these different approaches are not mutually exclusive. Our own experience of quantitative analyses lies in the first line of research, but we find also system-centred analysis important not least since quantitative system-centred intersectional approaches can uncover discourses of risk and inequality. One such example is corpus linguistic discourse analysis (Partington et al. 2013), a method that enables a mapping of the occurrence of specific terms—such as risk, security, threats, security—over time in particular countries and a discursive analysis of how they are associated with, or apart from, other concepts, for example gender and sexuality, or a certain context, if the context is, for example, the meaning of the term, and how this context changes over time. In this way, it is possible to illustrate possible shifts in discursive text content in both security policy and news reporting in the countries studied. The method has recently been introduced in the

risk research of, among others, Jens Zinn, Marcus Müller, and Max Boholm, who in their studies include considerations of how the frequency and meaning of the risk concept has changed over time (Zinn and MacDonald 2016), how discourses of environmental threats vary across countries (Muller and Stegmeier 2019), and how risk is associated and understood in instructions to Swedish authorities (Boholm 2015). However, there are, to our knowledge, no studies that make the connection between risk and inequality that use of this kind of method. We will now illustrate how quantitative analysis can be accommodated within the performing the performative approach (Öhman and Olofsson 2019). The relevant methods must capture and visualise the complexity of social existence without reproducing or obscuring the underlying ideological and normative influences (Cho et al. 2013), and exploratory statistical analysis offers one way of achieving this. A data-driven search for statistical insights and models allows the data to reveal their underlying structure and preserves as much of the essential information as possible (Tukey 1977). From the many available techniques, we have selected multiple correspondence analysis as an illustrative example. Multiple correspondence analysis offers several advantages in the present context; in particular, as it is designed to find patterns in complex data and it does not depend on predefined categorisations or normative assumptions. The analysis creates contingency tables that represent separate spaces or multidimensional plots of individuals, their expressed perceptions and values, and their observed characteristics (Le Roux and Rouanet 2010). These spaces or fields (Bourdieu 1984) are created from relations between these observations defined as ‘variables’ since they vary; depending on which variables are included, it is possible to identify patterns of oppression and privilege or combinations of the two. As with all quantitative analyses, the method requires categorisations, but it is flexible, and the categories can overlap and mix, remaining active or inactive in the analysis. Since variables, single categories, and individuals can be ‘inactive’, they can be positioned in the space without influencing the form of the space.

Exploring Risk and Intersectionality: An Empirical Example of Performing Performative Notions of Risk In this example, we used a Swedish national postal survey where a sample of all Swedes was asked questions regarding a number of different variables intended to measure, among other things, social structures, inequalities, risk perceptions,1 safety measures,2 and various positions in terms of gender, place of origin, and social class (for more details about the survey and analyses, see Öhman and Olofsson 2019; Öhman et al. 2018).3 The different variables were used in a multiple correspondence analysis to extract the core dimensions of the relationships between risk perceptions, safety measures, and a number of other intersecting variables. Thus, through the analysis we try to capture the performance, or expressions, of risk at the individual level and how it relates to intersecting social structures such as riskregulating regimes. The dimensions defined by these relationships are visualised in the multiple correspondence analysis as a map which we define as a social space of risk, see Fig. 8.1 (see also, for example, Lee et al. 2012).

Fig. 8.1 A social space of risk with two dimensions made up by the relationships between expressed perceptions, behaviours, and characteristics

To perform an intersectional analysis we had to construct new variables form the information the respondents gave in the survey. The new variables are combinations of information and can be seen as constituting assemblages of social positions. The assemblages were constructed using the positions of gender, place of origin, and class— for instance, being a middle-class, native woman, or upper-class, non-

native man4—and were then entered in the analysis. Figure 8.1 shows all the variables including gender, place of origin, income, and risk perceptions and self-reported behaviour plotted in the space that they create the form of. The assemblages are also found in Fig. 8.1 but they do not contribute to the creation of the social space itself because they were included as ‘inactive’ or supplementary variables, that is, rather than using them to compute dimensions, they were overlaid on the existing space. In a multiple correspondence analysis, the researcher needs to analyse the results from how the different responses to the questions in the survey are distributed in the social space (there are statistical measurements to be used to support this analysis but we will not go into them here, see Greenacre 2007). A common way of interpreting the results is to look at the distances between the points in the map that visualises the variables; the closer two points are on the map, the more similar they are. In this way, patterns are detected and the dimensions interpreted. Following this, the two dimensions constituting the space (the horizontal and vertical lines in Fig. 8.1) are interpreted as representing status and resources (horizontal) and social support (vertical). On the horizontal dimension, we find high status, social class, and income on the left-hand side of the continuum and the opposite (self-stated) characteristics on the right-hand side. On the vertical dimension, we find on the lower part of the dimension responses indicating having a social network through which one can get help with economic, emotional, and practical things, while the higher up on the dimension the less social support is found. The space with these two dimensions was then further explored and analysed using an intersectional approach. To make interpretation easier for the reader, in Fig. 8.1 circles are used to mark the variables, indicating how the respondents expressed their risk perceptions and safety measures. The colour of the circle corresponds to the different variables: blue indicates the perception of pandemics, green alcohol consumption, and orange serious illnesses. Similarly, squares in red indicate the safety measures, having home insurance and a fire alarm. Turning to how gender, ethnicity, social class, and the assemblages that relate to this, we will take one example. Income seems to be rather

closely related to the variation of perception and safety measures taken, considering the almost linear relation where the higher the status the lower risk perception, but all safety measures are taken. What is interesting here from an intersectional perspective is that the assemblages say something different to what the single positions say. For instance, by including both the single categories, woman and man, as well as assemblages representing the intersection of various positions, it is possible to analyse what happens when the single positions of subordination and privilege become intersectional assemblages in relation to risk. In our case, men and women are found in different parts of the space, women closer to high risk perceptions and towards the end of the dimension with high social support. Men on the other side are found closer to the end of the dimension indicating low social support. This might correspond pretty well with previous research and also a kind of common sense, but taking the analysis further we find that the assemblages reveal more complex relationships. For example, we observe that mid- and low-income men with foreign backgrounds occupy positions in the social spaces with perceived low status and limited economic resources and occupy a midrange position in terms of social support. They experience more discrimination and violence than many others and see themselves as of low social status. They do not trust people as helpful or altruistic, and they have lower incomes but more social resources. High-income Swedes and Europeans of both genders occupy relatively similar positions on social status (high) and economic resources (high), but they differ in respect of social support. Swedish men who are high earners express low social support, almost similar to male high earners from outside of Europe. Thus, the intersectional analyses indicate a relation that goes beyond single categories, for example social class, through the interaction of positions and located in significantly different places in the social space. Figure 8.1 shows how single positions of subordination and privilege transform into intersectional assemblages and to conditions of life and inequality. For instance, it is possible to trace the privileged position of a high-income Swedish female and to contrast it with the position of, for example, a high-income female from outside Europe in terms of both status and social support and to

consider how these assemblages also intersect with perceptions of risk and risk behaviour. The high-income female with her origin outside of Europe has a large social network but does not perceive her social status as more than in the middle of the continuum. The Swedish female, on the other hand, perceives herself as having high status but not a large social network. Our point is that if we had looked at the single positions of class/income, gender, and ethnicity, we might have concluded that gender positions are relatively unimportant in understanding risk positions. However, the intersectional analysis shows that this is not the case, as the risk position of men from outside Europe differs considerably from that of women from outside Europe. Existing risk research (especially perception and communication research that employs quantitative methods) tends to reproduce structures and positions in terms of gender, ethnicity, and class, perpetuating the impression that these are stable and persistent over time and space. However, such analysis cannot capture the dynamic relationships between categories. By identifying patterns of intersecting structures of risk and oppression, privilege, and combinations of oppression and privilege, our research highlights the significance of intersecting positions in social spaces of risk. Multiple correspondence analysis makes it possible to analyse assemblages of gender, ethnicity, class, and risk positions within social spaces defined by risk attitudes and behaviours. In sum, we are certain that the explorative quantitative angle enables an intersectional analysis without violating the basic assumptions of intersectional and interpretative approaches. These examples illustrate multiple correspondence analysis’ potential for intersectional analysis of risk positions, highlighting how incomplete that knowledge would be if only single categories were analysed. The examples also show that risk ‘management’ tends to relate to intersectional assemblages, demonstrating empirically how the combination of positions increases our understanding of the relationships between intersectional assemblages and risk.

Intersectional Risk Analysis: Concluding Remarks

Feminist philosophers of science (e.g. Harding 1991; Haraway 1988) have criticised traditional research for its claims to objectivity and general vision—what Haraway (1988, p. 581) refers to as playing the ‘God trick’—and have redefined scientific methodology and its analytic categories. They have contributed significantly to the discussion by transferring the Enlightenment’s epistemological assumptions to the sphere of politics and ethics, arguing that science is itself political. There is no universally objective perspective from which we can view the world, as every purportedly ‘objective’ standpoint can be shown to bear the mark of social, political, and cultural influences in even its most basic assumptions (Haraway 1988). Harding (1991) contends that the ‘objectivist’ epistemology associated with modern science is a good example of an attempt to hide its own social and political origins. It follows that research that embraces its social, cultural, and political origins will be less biased and therefore more objective. We need to question our own taken-for-granted exemption from the sullying interests of perspective, deconstructing methodology to show that method is not simply a technical apparatus but a rhetorical means of concealing metaphysically and politically freighted arguments. As many scholars before us, we have argued that intersectionality raises fundamental methodological questions, particularly in relation to quantitative methods, about how to analyse mutually constitutive processes (Choo and Ferree 2010; Hancock 2007; McCall 2005). For example, it has previously been argued that only analyses that treat categories as fluid are considered truly ‘intersectional’. Our own take on the contradiction between stability and fluidity is that ‘categories’ can be viewed as historically institutionalised positions that interlock people in different positions through social relations. To us, that means that we can deal with the stable/fluid dichotomy and the ‘dichotomy of dichotomies’ by focusing on their relations to each other as well as the patterns of inequality that they are connected with. We began this chapter by noting the need to problematise social scientific research strategies and methodologies in order to critically explore the intersections between risk and inequality. We also argue for a plurality of analytical strategies and flexible application of methods in keeping with the research context. An investigation of gendered and

racialised risk regulation regimes and a study of how risk is done in everyday life will require different methodological approaches. In practice, all possible means must be deployed to fight inequality and empower the disadvantaged, including quantitative approaches. At the same time, any approach based on quantitative data must be careful not to reproduce the status quo. Specifically, we need methods that accommodate the necessary temporal definitions of positions in social hierarchies, based on gender, race, class, sexuality, and so on. By exploring the intersections of these positions, we can identify relationships between structures of oppression and subjective experiences at a particular time and place, which are important in understanding risk, inequality, and positions of privilege. From a methodological perspective, it may seem problematic or impossible to mix interpretative and quantitative methods in departing from intersectional theory. In this regard, we follow Sprague (2005) and others who have addressed the relationship between methodology and methods, focusing more on design and interpretation. We also adhere to our views on epistemological ambivalence as outlined in Chap. 1. In theorising the intersection of multiple complex inequalities, we contend that the common dichotomy between structure and agency needs to be questioned and reimagined as a dynamic continuum of simultaneity; the same can surely be said for the relationship between interpretative and quantified methodologies, finding ways to combine different approaches rather than stressing their incommensurability.

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Footnotes 1 The risks that are included here are serious illnesses, such as cancer and heart disease, consuming alcohol, and pandemics such as Ebola.

 

2 The safety measures included are having home insurance and a fire alarm.

 

3 The dataset used in the analyses is composed of two representative samples of the Swedish population between the ages of 16 and 75: a random national sample of all inhabitants in Sweden (n = 2,500, response rate 41%) and a random sample of people living in three districts in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö (n = 1,000, response rate 25%). In total, 1,078 people

completed the questionnaire. The purpose of the second sample was to increase the number of people with foreign backgrounds in the dataset. Due to language problems and incomplete or inaccurate addresses, the response rate among people with foreign backgrounds was expected to be low.

 

4 In Fig. 8.1 the different assemblages are illustrated using acronyms representing, in this order, gender (W for women, M for men), place of origin (A for Africa, South America, and Asia; E for Europe) and social class, measured by income (LI for low income, MI for middle income, and HI for high income). Altogether 18 assemblages were created this way: WALI, WAMI, WAHI, MALI, MAMI, MAHI, WELI, WEMI, WEHI, MELI, MEMI, MEHI, WSLI, WSMI, WSHI, MSLI, MSMI, MSHI. For a more detailed description of how to use and interpret Multiple Correspondence Analysis, see Öhman and Olofsson 2019).

 

© The Author(s) 2020 K. Giritli Nygren et al., A Framework of Intersectional Risk Theory in the Age of Ambivalence, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33524-3_9

9. Risk, Intersectionality, and Ambivalence: A Way to Understand Inequality Katarina Giritli Nygren1   , Anna Olofsson1   and Susanna Öhman1   (1) Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall and Östersund, Sweden

 

  Katarina Giritli Nygren (Corresponding author) Email: [email protected]   Anna Olofsson Email: [email protected]   Susanna Öhman Email: [email protected] Keywords Risk – Intersectionality – Ambivalence – Inequality

Introduction A mobile, the kind that you can have outside to let the breeze gently swing the various parts, showing its different sides and sometimes making sounds, could be used as an illustration of the theoretical framework we have presented in this book: intersectional risk theory and its related concepts. This is an ensemble consisting of different pieces that creates different patterns depending on the context and the angle from which you look at it. It is through such moving and fluid figures that we can find ways to understand and put our own time into

perspective. Ambivalence, as mentioned previously, is at the core of all this, and for us ambivalence means an epistemological point of departure: it stresses that this theoretical framework is not an endeavour to explain the world and is not a ‘grand theory’, but rather, is a toolbox to better understand the logic underlying the social world. In this last chapter, we will sum up our arguments and present intersectional risk theory and its key concepts. In addition to intersectionality, risk, ambivalence, and inequality, another set of concepts has been presented and discussed in the book, of which the following are significant for intersectional analyses of risk: gendered risk regimes, performative subjectification, doing, redoing, and undoing risk, standpoint existentialism, and assemblages. In this last chapter, we will repeat and clarify these concepts as well as bind them together in the theoretical framework that they constitute. In our approaches to intersectionality as well as to risk, ambivalence is a key enabler in the way we use it as a critical standpoint for resignification; and in that way it can also be understood as a form of resistance. As for the epistemological questions pertaining to the relationship between discourse and reality, personal experiences in everyday life and aspects of wider social organisation, as well as between interpreting and counting whilst analysing these different aspects of the social world, our answer is ambivalence—not either-or, but sometimes both. Just like ambivalence, intersectionality is fundamental to this framework. Intersectionality and feminist theory, more broadly, have been the theoretical fields where we found the knowledge and inspiration for the suggested conceptual toolbox. Thus, we apply the knowledge and concepts produced within gender studies by developing intersectional risk theory as a mobile element with its own patterns and expressions. An intersectional framework for analysing injustices embraces ambivalent perspectives and contradictory realities as well as oblique knowledge relationships. It is a relational approach that interrogates positions and conditions, but also our responsibility to try to promote justice—something that Butler emphasises as critical conditions for democratic life: Our shared exposure to precarity is but one ground of our potential equality and our reciprocal obligations to produce

together conditions of livable life. In avowing the need we have for one another, we avow as well basic principles that inform the social, democratic conditions of what we might still call ‘the good life’. These are critical conditions of democratic life in the sense that they are part of an ongoing crisis, but also because they belong to a form of thinking and acting that responds to the urgencies of our time. (Butler 2015, pp. 218–219) If the relationship between individual actors and the social needs to be an object of investigation the following question must be: where does risk fit in? Risk is, as we have tried to show throughout the book, a field of investigation—not necessarily as in an empirical examination but more as in a kind of theoretical exploration. Risk itself is a perfect example of ambiguity, since it always exists in different viewpoints from which we evaluate whether there is or could be a threat. Views differ on how to assess and consider a possible threat, and even more when it comes to particular judgements on the relevance, meaning, and implications of available risk information as well as which actions to consider. This is because our understanding of risk is dependent on the time and the context in question, based on norms, ideologies, and individual experience. Therefore, risk is neither ‘real’ nor merely a construction, but has materialised consequences in people’s everyday lives. What makes risk worth unpacking is the fluidity of the term, its inherent power, at least from a modernist view, therewith entangled with inequality. This is also the reason we create a space in which we reconsider the theoretical understanding of risks and the ways in which such understandings intersect with other power relations, making it possible to both construct and deconstruct the social. The last fundamental concept is inequality. It has been a key companion throughout the book, but without any clear discussion on how we engage with the concept theoretically. Therefore, we will now return to the initial question on how we understand the interplay between risk and inequality from different angles and summarise our way of mixing pieces from different puzzles and carving an intersectional approach to inequality and risk into the picture. As we have stated before, we will not use violence to make the pieces fit together, nor try to hide the misfits. Instead we will do our best to tell a

story that convinces the audience that the pieces do not necessarily need to fit. As we have attempted to outline so far, to be a subject (and body) today is to be dependent on the discourses, ideas, techniques, and devices that are often established by norms and normality. In this context, as we have argued, it may be necessary to emphasise that this is not (only) about the ability of ideas and concepts to influence our notions, or about social constructivism, but about far more complicated interactions between materialities, practices, techniques, languages, ideas, and so on. So, where does this line of reasoning lead us? In the beginning of this book, we asked if ambivalence could be considered an epistemology where reflexivity and objectualism (Latour and Woolgar 1979) replace dualism as an actor–structure? The pendulum of ambivalence swings between contradictory feelings regarding an object, the different social positions of an individual and never stops in the middle; the simultaneous existence of extremes is the basis of the emergence of ambivalence. The question becomes whether ambivalence allows a monolithic knowledge claim, or multiple meanings, or if it rather maintains the binary worldview of the Enlightenment. As we have described earlier, Saba Mahmood (2011) has discussed the shortcomings of European and North American feminism, and we believe that risk research has similar shortcomings, that is, the lack of intellectual focus on problematising its own political starting point. The starting point of risk research rests on an inheritance from the Enlightenment, the autonomous will as a requirement for agency and self-realisation, which in itself relies on the liberal idea of the human being as a transcendental subject, independent of historical and external conditions and able, through rational thought, to express rational requests. In the following section, we will summarise and extend our discussion of the key concepts that we want to put forward, some of which have already been presented quite extensively, such as doing risk, whilst others have received less attention in the previous chapters.

Intersectional Risk-Regulating Regimes Risk governance can be said to be keeping communities and societies together, by producing and reproducing social categorisations. In other

words, we have to understand the genealogical question of the relations between the self and society, as otherwise we cannot clarify the mechanisms for risk governance and their relations with inequality. We believe that risk governance contributes to both social cohesion and inequality by reproducing stratified social relations, such as collective habits, laws, rules and policies, as well as defining and therewith creating risk groups (Lupton 1993; Douglas 1990). As mentioned previously, the concept of regime is a the key enabler here in bringing insights from the fields of gender regimes and risk regulation regimes together to explore the complex weft of practices and discourses further, thereby providing direction and regulation that are objectified, impersonal, claiming universality, and displaying a specific interrelation between gendered, racialised, and classed forms of risk groups. It is not just about regulation or control, but cohesion, especially in institutionalised risk governance and self-regulatory regimes. To understand this kind of governance, intersectionality, with its focus on the diversity of interacting social categories, is a very apposite theoretical perspective. It helps us understand how gendered risk regulating regimes are part of (social) integration and exclusion, and how ruling relations of risk relate to institutions and create these risky or at-risk groups. For example, as we pointed out in Chap. 3, when migration and racism are entangled with nationalism and gender equality in the politics of extreme right-wing parties, they bring into being specific intersectional risk positions. The values of tolerance and equality sometimes associated with the Nordic welfare model are echoed in current populist politics as being ‘at risk’ and threatened by migration and the multicultural society. Thus, such risk regimes are paving the way for intolerance, discrimination, and violence. Through explorations of the risk groups inherent in contemporary risk regulation regimes and how they relate to hierarchies of gender, class, race, and sexuality, as well as geographies, the elementary structures of these hierarchies, along with their intersections with risk technologies, can be explored. For example, intersectional analyses of the ways in which risk functions can uncover how risk disconnects subjects from their experiences. This is not just a matter of individual positioning but of socio-structural differences that may be manufactured through the use of particular framing devices, such as risk technologies. In other

words, we propose that inequalities are manufactured by modes of governance, including the use of ‘risk’ as a regulatory regime.

Performative Subjectification and Risk If risk regulation regimes produce intersectional risk groups, what does it mean for the ones that are positioned within those groups and categories? Risk positions are ingrained with values and beliefs that are as powerful in their normalising force as the governance structures they permeate. In the search for a social structure that is not an allencompassing force that can explain everything, norms and normalisation have attracted attention from both gender and risk scholars. Our take, as mentioned previously, is that the concept of normalisation, since it has been used in both feminist and risk theory, can open up the way for an intersectional analysis of social structures and risk, and as such bridge the gap between gender and risk theorising. The subject becomes possible through acts of interpellation and normalisation and the performative aspects of risk acknowledge inherent contradictions, and the possibility of resignifying ideological interpellation. Normalising acts take place alongside contemporary hierarchies of power—where the call is performative, precisely because it initiates the individual into a subjected status of a subject. Tracing discourses and uncovering the performativity of risk is about deciphering how proposed preventative strategies can be seen as a consequence of how a particular problem, expressed in terms of risk, is articulated and what its causal explanations are. This kind of theoretical analysis can be used to disentangle the performativity of risk and study how it is intertwined with the processes by which intersectional risk positions are normalised, mobilised, and function to uphold other formations. Risks, or rather risk discourse and talk about risks, are performative in that the talk prescribes certain perceptions and behaviours. This is to be considered as the work of processes of normalisation, where the conduct of the individual is governed through moral discourses of responsibility—a process that then masks itself by framing the conduct as the outcome of a free and individual choice. Risk discourses

interpellate individuals, and in this performative act, we become subjects of risk discourses and their underpinning values and priorities. Risk as performative subjectification means identifying and analysing speech acts that bring the subject into a risk-conscious selfregulating being. The concept of risk is used to categorise individuals or groups into ‘those at risk’ and ‘those posing a risk’. To be ‘at risk’ is equivalent to being vulnerable to the events caused by others, whereas being ‘a risk’ means being the potential cause of harm (Douglas 1990, p. 7). Some are not even considered as being ‘at risk’, or vulnerable, or risky for that matter, although their lives are often marked by misery and precariousness. This can be either people who are far way, or those who are strangers amongst us, whose lives do not seem precious—the ‘ungrieveable lives’ (Butler 2004). A key argument of intersectional risk theory is that risks are performative and always co-articulated with other norms and discourses that, in turn, impact how (in)equalities are and can be done (see, for example, Olofsson et al. 2014; Giritli Nygren et al. 2015). We described the doubleness of interpellation as a way of capturing ambivalence. In this society, we share the ideological belief that we are sovereign beings and autonomous subjects of ourselves. Yet, in such moments, we are exposed to, defined, and possessed by forces beyond us. Interpellation is an instance of performativity: becoming a subject that is the ambivalence of mastery and submission, which, paradoxically, take place simultaneously, in the same moment. The individual subject is not possible without this simultaneous submission and mastery. Thus, subjectivity is not a state of being, but rather, a state of doing.

Doing, Redoing, and Undoing Risk If intersectional risk positions are performative and constitute subjects, that is only one side of the coin; the other side is about the ways in which they are enacted and performed in the everyday—what we have labelled as the doing, redoing, and/or undoing of risk. Performativity is primarily a constitutive process, and thus, it is not about subjects doing risk but the subjective enactment; however, it implies the performance or doing of risk. It is the iterative process of performativity in the

enactment of an ideal that can never be fully achieved or accomplished, and therefore is always incomplete and opens up for subjective performance and resistance. Risk discourses, then, can (and should) also be investigated both from the angle of subjectivity. The ‘doing risk’ is, as we tried to outline in Chap. 5, a way to explore the embodied experience and emotions related to risk governance and relations of ruling from the perspectives of the people participating in them. We assume that our consciousness is both discursive and practical, and shaped under unequal power relationships that we have the ability to more or less deliberately act strategically to reproduce or resist. In these relationships, the notions of risk are formed, or rather we do the risk as part of our subjectivities and the social categories that we perform. To do risk means that we think or act in a certain way to avoid something unwanted, such as avoiding going to hospital if you worry about being discriminated against because of your gender affiliation. But acting in this way reproduces both the risk and the normative expectations of, in this case, gender identity, and hence, heteronormativity. This creates a complex and situational understanding of risk and risk behaviour. The latter often becomes selfregulating, embodied, and constantly present, and in this way the doing of risk is as much the doing of sex, class, race, sexuality, and so on. Acting in the way one is expected to can create anxiety and even fear (Butler 1993). Anxiety that occurs in such a situation can be so great that other risks, such as for one’s health, become subordinate because the anxiety is related to one’s very self-identity. However, the ability to rearticulate or disturb these power orders is also an opportunity for us to redo or undo a certain risk. This means that risks in everyday life also largely imply a struggle over the definition and the power of constructing something as a risk (or not). Risks can be undone in various ways, deliberately or unconsciously, by actors who, in this way, challenge existing norms and beliefs that are associated with a particular risk object. When a risk is undone, it becomes disturbed and is made irrelevant as a social artefact. When people who do not usually appear in a particular context start doing so, for example women as rock climbers, this destabilises the relationship between the norm and risk calculation and a process for reorganising risks associated with, for example, discrimination then starts.

What is then the difference between redoing and undoing in this context? We do not think that it is necessarily a matter of either/or, and in practice it is difficult to see when a risk is undone—it is for the historians of the future to discover. For an individual, it can be difficult to change the relations between risk objects, social positions, and practices, but by rearticulating, and not performing exactly according to expectations, structures can change over time. Sarah Ahmed calls this ‘deviance’, and we find it a good example of what is needed to create change. Through deviance, and not complying with the expected subjecthood, we can start to retake, takeover, and refuse. Deviation creates anxiety and fear, but also thrill, and done together with others new forms of solidarity make it possible to ‘risk a new sense of being a subject’ (Ahmed 2016, p. 484). A prerequisite for resisting or redoing risk as a category of power is to reveal how risk is interwoven with intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and so on. We need to become aware of taken-for-granted orientations to discover the lines that guide us in our everyday lives and often it is when we are disoriented or for some reason we move outside our comfort zone that this awareness can be achieved. It is the discomfort that might create an opening for seeing and learning about oneself and our surroundings, both social and material, as a sort of risk reflexivity.

Standpoint Existentialism Thinking of what intersectional risk positions are doing with us as well as what we are doing with them is important for understanding how risk and inequality are related but, from our point of view, this is not enough. As discussed in Chap. 6, it is also necessary to gain knowledge of the lived experiences of risk to properly grasp the relationship between the ambivalence within individual/subjective and collective/structural dimensions and the way this relationship generates conflicting frames. The existential standpoint provided by the phenomenology of risk shows the importance of situated knowledge for analyses of the subjective first-person character of risk awareness and experience—an awareness that always starts from a particular point of view, a kind of here-ness that is specific to me.

Rather than problematising the relationship between the subject and the social context, and other subjects particularly, this level of analysis invests in apprehending knowledge through the eyes of the beholder. Whilst incorporating standpoint existentialism into a frame of the ambiguity of knowing, in that there is no fixed existence, we want to challenge the often quite realist understandings of lived experiences. It is, to us, rather a matter of generating knowledge without predefined understandings of the social context, based on the conditions of the particular subject, in a particular place, at a particular time—to turn it into a question of investigation. This means that we consider agency as the capacity to act, which is shaped by history and place-related norms. Subjectivity is not only about producing radical counter-subjectivities, it is also about daily practices and negotiations that take place within dominant norms. Another compelling feature of existentialism is that it recognises both ambiguity and complexity of societies, both in terms of structure and agency, but not in the same way as, for example, new materialism with its hiding of the intersecting structures of power. The concept of risk needs to be further elaborated to embrace emic categories, as well as the complexity and contingency of everyday life and its interpretation through language. Combining intersectional risk theory with other critical theories such as the exploration of individual biographies or life-worlds, we can challenge realist assumptions of lived experiences. In risk research, we can reveal knowledge of a particular individual’s conditions that is otherwise undetected or concealed. It is a phenomenology of risk that often takes the standpoint of the life in the margins, but at the same time it is important not to forget the significance of investigating the viewpoint of those who, in one way or the other, can be considered as privileged. Without the investigation of the ‘centre’, the current positions will continue to be the taken for granted, although often unconsciously, and so will constitute not only the centre but also the margins. This means that if we want to study the experience of risk, it should be accompanied by an analysis of what that analysis—maybe unintentionally—brings with it in terms of assumptions, theoretical understandings, and methodological practices that are taken for granted.

Assemblages Whilst thinking of risk in relation to the divides between margin and centre, not only as social power asymmetries, but also as materialised and physical locations, the concept of the assemblage can be useful. The individual always already has a multitude of intersecting subject positions. The focus of the assemblage is on relations between humans and non-humans, as well as the past, present, and future. Risk is constituted and produced both in social and geographic spaces, as well as in the various power relations that prevail there, sometimes even materialised in physical artefacts, such as the security objects that are used for national border control. We need to explore how the intersections of social identities, practices, and materialities are shaping networks of health, environmental, technological, infrastructural, and territorialised risks in order to disentangle the role of a certain object in shaping social relations of inequality. We should also consider how they relate to risk objects and how processes such as these become naturalised or are made invisible by the very idea of how a society functions today. It is with a kind of ambivalence that we have included a discussion on the materialist turn in this book, since it is on the periphery of what we want to express with intersectional risk theory. It is true that intersectional analysis of risk includes fluidity and we embrace the concept of assembly as a way to capture gendered, raced, and classed interactions between humans and non-humans in the same process. At the same time, we do not adhere to new materialism’s flat ontology. The concept of the assemblage does have the potential to acknowledge the fluidity and complexity of current individualised and globalised societies without hiding the intersecting hegemonic structures of power. To be a subject (and body) is to be dependent on the discourses, ideas, techniques, and devices that make us and that are a part of the world that is to a degree established by norms and normality. In this context, it could be necessary to emphasise that this is not (only) about the ability of ideas and concepts to influence our notions, or about social constructivism, but about far more complicated intra-actions amongst materialities, practices, techniques, languages, ideas, and more.

Concluding Remarks With this book, we have tried to open up the concept of risk using critical feminist theory. The conceptual framework has been ambivalence and the key set of ideas has been supplied by intersectional theory. We wanted to demonstrate the intricate relationship between risk phenomena and power. The latter is expressed in everything from risk-regulating regimes and selfregulation, that is, from risk governance to the risk-reducing behaviour of everyday life that is taken for granted. To us, this also means moving the inequalities based on gender, class, race, and sexuality into the centre rather than leaving them at the margins of (risk) theory. This is also related to the ongoing debate on how to understand the basis of inequality and its relationship with materialistic and discursive explanations. Our response has been to emphasise critical methods, both quantitative and qualitative, through intersectional risk theory, linking our understanding of global economic structures, nationalism, rationalisation, and the like to both materialistic and discursive processes. We live in what can be described as ambivalent times, when the constant presence of risk and uncertainty increases our day-to-day dependence on science and expertise. This also heightens demand for alternative explanations and a clearer understanding of life and society, even to the extent of questioning expert and democratic systems. We need ambivalence to better understand how risk awareness, mitigation, and management are used to rationalise and colonise everyday life and entire societies. This is because risk rationalisation and governance mask and sometimes shore up the structures of power, underpinning the uneven distribution of both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ emerging from the production process. These inequities have received relatively little attention from risk researchers, particularly at the conceptual and theoretical level. Similarly, the colonisation of risk governance and its relation to power and inequality seems to have escaped the attention of most critical feminist scholars in their theoretical analyses of power and inequality. These themes pervade sociological discussions of modern society, where ambivalence forms a part of the dialectics of safety and danger,

and of uncertainty and risk (Giddens 1990). The Enlightenment’s belief in linearity, knowledge, order, and the death of God resulted in a rejection of alternative explanatory models and became inseparable from its opposite: uncertainty and ambivalence (Bauman 1991). It is within these frames of the modern that we imagine the postmodern, or more modern society of today. The connection between uncertainty and ambivalence can be expressed in terms of the choices, responsibilities, and risks that are unavoidable consequences of uncertainty; it is not possible to live a moral life, making the ‘right’ choices, taking responsibility, and avoiding risk without the inherent uncertainty of ambivalence in postmodernity (see Smart 1999). The boundary between normative judgements of risk and objective hazards has become blurred, and a hybridity between moral discourses and discourses of risk has been created (Hunt 2003): non-risky is constructed as the normal, whilst actions that transgress the normal or that could be labelled as deviant from this norm are constructed as risky. This is because conceptualisations of risk and the causes of risk are still often rooted in moral discourses. Intersectional risk theory brings with it an understanding of risk in the life of the individual as it is entangled with gendered, racialised, and classed experiences of being positioned in the periphery, centre, or somewhere in between, of these and other hierarchal ordered categories. Social scientific research strategies and methodologies also have to be problematised in order to explore the intersections between risk and inequality from a critical perspective and, as discussed in Chap. 8, a plurality of analytical strategies is needed as well as a flexible application of methods. We require methods that house the necessary temporal definition of positions in social hierarchies, based on gender, race, class, sexuality, and so on. By exploring the intersections amongst these positions, we can identify relationships between structures of oppression and individual experiences at a certain time and place, which are important in understanding risk, positions of privilege, and inequality. It may seem challenging or impossible to mix the interpretative and quantitative methods in departing from intersectional theory, but we believe that quantitative approaches have a place in the fight against inequality and aim to empower the disadvantaged, alongside more interpretative approaches. We agree

with Sprague (2005) and others who have addressed the relationship between methodology and methods in finding ways to combine different approaches, rather than emphasising their incommensurability. Explorative quantitative analysis allows an intersectional analysis without violating the basic assumptions of intersectional and interpretative approaches. The use of multiple correspondence analysis using intersectional assemblages captures a level of complexity that the use of single categories such as gender, ethnicity, or class would not allow. By identifying patterns of intersecting structures of risk and oppression, privilege, and combinations of oppression and privilege, our analysis can identify intersecting relations that othewise are black boxed. In this book, we have set the intersection of different power structures in the foreground, not only in risk governance but also in our efforts to better understand unequal conditions where risk is a part of individual everyday life. By thinking of risk as performative and performance, it is possible to differentiate between the discourses of risk to which we are subjected and how we subjectively invest in, reject, or negotiate these discourses in relation to each other. Risks are not objectively given and their constitution reflects strategies of power and knowledge. How to theorise the links between the material and symbolic dimensions of risk discourses remains an open question, confirming that risk discourses constitute the identities, expectations, and responsibilities that serve to discipline individuals. Processes, rather than dualist relationships, have been in focus when ambivalence is always meant to be a part of the theory itself. We have allowed theoretical tensions and inconsistencies to be a part of our conceptualisation of risk and inequality. In a similar way to how Puar, in her book Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, puts two divergent theoretical fields in conversation with each other, we have also tried to detect resonances and sympathies between different theoretical strands by showing their relevance for the studies of risk and inequality. Life contains dissonances and clearly, nobody is one dimensional, but we are reduced and reduce others to single categories —male, female, immigrant, young, old, and so on—categories that are constantly recurring in risk management, risk communication, risk perception, and so forth. This book contributes through a critical

review of this reductionist tendency and introduces dynamic intersectional analyses. Here, we return to the importance of ambivalence, which is about refusing to be reduced to a single category and taking a position that embraces ambivalence, differences, and other ways of looking at the world in pursuit of a deeper understanding of both ourselves and the society that we live in.

References Ahmed, S. (2016). Interview with Judith Butler. Sexualities, 19(4), 482–492. https://​doi.​org/​10.​ 1177/​1363460716629607​. [Crossref] Bauman, Z. (1991). Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of ‘sex’. London: Routledge. Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. New York: Routledge. [Crossref] Butler, J. (2015). Notes towards a performative theory of assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Crossref] Douglas, M. (1990). Risk as a forensic resource. Daidalus, 119(4), 1–16. Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Giritli Nygren, K., Fahlgren, S., & Johansson, A. (2015). Reassembling the ‘normal’ in neoliberal policy discourses: Tracing gender regimes in the age of risk. Nordic Journal of Social Research, 6, 24–43. https://​doi.​org/​10.​7577/​njsr.​2081.​ [Crossref] Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1979). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications. Lupton, D. (1993). Risk as moral danger. The social and political functions of risk discourse in public health. International Journal of Health Services, 23(3), 425–435. [Crossref] Mahmood, S. (2011). Politics of piety—The Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton University Press. Olofsson, A., Zinn, J. O., Griffin, G., Giritli Nygren, K., Cebulla, A., & Hannah-Moffat, K. (2014). The mutual constitution of risk and inequalities: Intersectional risk theory. Health, Risk & Society, 16(5), 417–430. [Crossref]

Smart, C. (1999). A history of ambivalence and conflict in the discursive construction of the ‘child victim’ of sexual abuse. Social & Legal Studies, 8(3), 391–409. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1177/​ 0964663999008003​06. [Crossref] Sprague, J. (2005). Feminist methodologies for critical researchers. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.

Epilogue: Imagining the Future Differently Following the concluding discussion, in the epilogue we change our perspective and provide insights into the future by arguing for the need for utopian thinking as a method for movement beyond the trappings of current discourse, one that may offer a grace that is both existential and relational (Levitas 2010 , pp. xii–xiii). The essence of the intersectional approach is that the allocation of material and symbolic social resources should not be governed by hierarchical categorisation in terms of gender / sexuality , race/ ethnicity , or class. This requires that the normalised beliefs, behaviour patterns, traditions, and symbols that cause injustices and structural oppression need to be constantly explored and questioned. As researchers (and feminists), we have a responsibility to think of justice and equality beyond ourselves, but not only as thinkers: we also have a responsibility to act politically. We need to take responsibility—for being a voice against extreme individualism and competition, against sexism, racism, and fascism, as well as the communities these sorts of ideas create. Sometimes this work is quite depressing, since the steps taken towards justice appear too small and too slow, and often there is counter-struggle by other actors and there can seem to be a constant crisis of solidarity. Thus, Ruth Levitas writes about risk as an appealing concept, for both good and bad reasons: How do the available discourses of risk affect how we think about the future? Risk is a broad concept, and an appealing one. It appeals for a good reason, and for a bad one. The good reason is that it makes ecological (not just environmental) questions central, and reminds us, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, that considering how dangerous everything is, we are not nearly frightened enough, while simultaneously addressing the fact that it is very difficult for us to know just how frightened we should be. The bad reason is that it is a very elastic concept. (Levitas 2013 , p. 123) In researching risk, power , and soaring inequalities whilst drawing on an intersectional risk framework, we need ways to avoid our theoretical thinking getting into a dystopic impasse or being caught in a

state of ‘political depression’. In order to hold onto an idea that the world could be different, inspired by Ruth Levitas’ ( 2013 ) utopia as a method, we will call for an intersectional awareness and a publicly engaged sociology that attempts not only to imagine but also to make the world more equal. Such a sociology, we wish to believe, has the capacity to embody hope. However, utopias that aim to embody a universal appeal and to save humanity must of course be questioned. There is always a risk that they will be turned into a single story that silences others. Such a monolithic approach also does not fit with the conscious ambivalence that we have discussed in this book. Instead, we consider that it may be necessary to imagine, with the help of fantasies, how it could be if it was possible to change the normalised beliefs, behavioural patterns, and symbols that cause current inequalities and structural oppression. Such an emancipatory view of science does not mean to say that science should be politics. Rather, it argues that there is no single boundary between knowledge and politics and that research must take into account the fact that power is implicated in all aspects of knowledge. By deconstructing, for example, a conceptual dichotomy (such as binary gender categories) and shifting its meaning, it may be possible to imagine that things could be different, to visualise something that was previously not possible to see because of the very structure that the dichotomy has been part of establishing, or open an opportunity that has been closed because of it. This is to be utopic in our sense: to resist borders, categories, and determinations in order for something new to happen. So, if intersectional awareness and ambivalence are necessary, where does risk come into our utopian fantasies? Ulrich Beck’s theory of a development towards a risk society is often described as dystopian, even though Beck ( 1992 ) himself saw the theory more as an eye opener and had a rather optimistic view of the future; and, as we have discussed, risk is a technique that indeed brings the future into the present and in so doing attempts to make the future governable. However, the ever-present pre-emption of tomorrow into the present through risk management also holds a possibility, and even more so does the theorisation of risk and thereby the future, since it enable ways for us to envisage this future differently. For example, Beck (2000,

p. 212) argues: ‘We need a new sociological imagination, one that is sensitive to the concrete paradoxes and challenges of reflexive modernity and which, at the same time, is thoughtful and strong enough to pen up the walls of abstraction in which academic routines are captured.’ Levitas ( 2013 ), as indicated in the quote above, has noticed this too and points out that risk includes both the dystopian ‘if this goes on…’ and the utopian ‘if only…’, and therefore risk urges us to ask ‘what is to be done?’ However, there is another question we need to ask, says Levitas, namely ‘how shall we live? The discourse of risk is powerful in its regulating capacity and the material consequence of risk can be devastating. But it is not through the language of risk that we can answer the last question, because the common discourse of risk brings the future into a calculative relation to the present. … A transformed future, especially one which is, as it must be, substantially unknown, and which stands in a very uncertain relation to the present, is unthinkable within the discourse of risk, which quite clearly operates as a legitimation of the existing system. It is, in fact, the standard discourse of capitalism, in which it is a matter of luck and market forces who are winners and who are losers (but we are all winners in the end). It promotes the pinning of utopian hopes on winning the lottery; pure luck, no skill, no responsibility, no guilt. This very primitive form of utopian dreaming depends on changing one’s position within the system, rather than changing the system—and doing so in a way attributable only to luck and chance. (Levitas 2000 , p. 201) Neoliberalism and capitalism are central when we try to understand risk, and our own shift from producers to consumers in late modernity (Beck 1992 ) has also brought with it a move from scarcity and welfare distribution with a positive utopia of equality, to wealth and risk distribution with a negative utopia of safety (Levitas 2000 ). Why is the utopia of safety negative? Because it is about avoiding negative outcomes, compared to striving towards something positive, towards equality. This shift also redirects the focus of political life and policy from reduction of inequalities towards reduction of risk, legitimation of

risk management, and safeguarding of safety and security. Levitas ( 2000 ) argues that what is needed to imagine utopia is a sociology that places the relationship between the accumulation of capital, thus inequality, and the accumulation of danger at the centre of its analyses (see also Curran 2016 and Walby 2015 ), one that acknowledges that profound conflicts of interest will always be present in market-based societies. Thus, we need to think beyond (late) modernity and current socio-economic systems—only then we can imagine real utopia . Therefore, to deepen our understanding of the complexities, challenges, and possibilities of risk mobilisation, we call for more comparative conversations (and analyses) exploring the links between them, locally, nationally, and transnationally, thereby uncovering insights into how we could challenge its unequal underpinnings—as they appear in dichotomies such as subject–object, North–South, and global–local. Following this, we believe that gender equality and social justice must acknowledge democratic pluralism, unpredictability, and situated knowledge. Therefore, we find it fundamental to critically deconstruct ‘stable categories’, such as gender , race, and nations (Narayan 2000). All this works just as Levitas ( 2013 ) says utopias should be able to function: as a critical archaeology, which shows how things that are taken for granted are constructed, and as an architecture, which means imagining the world differently— reconstructing it. Utopias are particularly interesting in the context of risk because it is often claimed that they are related to terror and violence in totalitarian settings (Arendt 1951) and that they represent the concept of perfect and harmonious societies (Dahrendorf 1958). This is not the future we imagine ourselves. Instead, we think that there is an ongoing need for different fantasies and visions to make spaces for pluralistic equality and for places where these visions can be developed and enacted. According to Levitas ( 2013 ), it is not our hope but our longing that is at core of our utopias . From such a perspective there is a desire for a more equal world as the central issue, rather than the question of whether it is possible. Utopias can be future oriented and changeable, and they can, in plural, reflect a longing whereby not only dreams and visions are expressed but also the societal and social situations from which they arose. Utopian thinking as a method must, therefore, involve

a continual process of change where we repeatedly discuss our structured relationships and what they mean and how they can be challenged. It entails working against all forms of violence and oppression, such as those that are currently experienced, and seeking new stories and understandings of the contingency of equality. Does risk have a place in utopia ? We hope not.

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Index 1 A Actants Actors Agency Ambivalence Assemblages

B Biopolitics Bricolage

C Critical perspective

D Discourse analysis Doing gender

Doing risk

E Ethnicity Everyday life Existentialism

F Feminist theories Focus group interviews

G Gender Gender regimes Global North Governmentality

I Inequality Interpellation Intersectionality Intersectional risk theory

M Materialism Material turn Modernity Monolithic Multiple correspondence analysis (MCA)

N Normalisation

P Performance Performativity Postmodernity Poststructuralism Power

R Redoing risk Reflexivity Risk governance Risk networks Risk regulating regimes Risk society

S Sexuality Social class Sociology of risk Standpoint Structure

U Uncertainty Undoing risk Utopia

Footnotes 1 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.