Risk

Abstract

Risk as a term invokes a sense of uncertainty and danger. Risk in androcentric discourses operates on gender binary modes postulating male and masculine as active risk-takers; embedded in themes that rarely account for women's knowledge, opinions, and decisions. In this paper, I oppose such notions and propose risk as a feminist keyword-a term that provides potential to women's everyday worlds and presents women as active technicians of their own lives. Risk in its feminist rendition emerged in my ethnographic fieldwork in Banaras (North India). Banaras is a Hindu holy city that has obscured its women inhabitants and their experiences in its sacred rhetoric. In mapping women's worlds in Banaras, by privileging lived and embodied experiences, risk surfaced as an integral part of the everyday for women to contemplate their ways of being vis-à-vis the control, containment and violence deployed by patriarchy and its custodians. The paper argues that risk-taking exists in ordinary domains and is not restricted to unique situations. It is taken by women to actualize their worlds through corporeal, experiential, and sensorial knowledge. Thus, risk as a feminist keyword provides unique ways to comprehend everyday insistences and resistances by marginal bodies.

After Dobbs: Reflections on political and legal anthropology

“…I think of risk ahead of resistance in this context to highlight the extent to which dealing with risk—even embracing it—involves a rearrangement of relations beyond the law, not just in direct response to or through law's implementation (Singer, 2018). Risk has become a “feminist keyword” (borrowing Shavani Gupta's phrase in a related context; Gupta, 2022), and ethnographic writings on the politics of abortion abundantly show the recursive effect of risk‐taking as creative self‐expression and agentive mobilization (Andaya & Mishtal, 2017; Buchbinder, 2016; see also McCaffrey, 2023).…”