Risk and Feminist Utopia: Radicalizing the Future

• Author: Jeanne Cortiel
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12252
• Date: 01 November 2018
• Published date: 01 November 2018

Risk and Feminist Utopia:

Radicalizing the Future

By Jeanne Cortiel*

abstraCt. Risk has taken over the world as the major way of

conceptualizing the future as bleak, if one follows Ulrich Beck’s claim in

World at Risk (2007). However, there is also a distinctly utopian strand

in American risk discourse, one that has, from the outset, been linked to

feminist perspectives. Indeed, when risk entered American culture in

the 19th century, immediately women’s rights philosophy began to draw

on futures shaped by risk, establishing self-ownership and agency in a

context that denied such freedom to women and non-white men. This

article explores connections between risk, futurity, agency, and selfhood

as expressed in feminist thought, drawing a line between Margaret

Fuller’s political essay Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Joanna

Russ’s science fiction novel The Female Man (1975), and Mary Daly’s

radical feminist manifesto Quintessence: Realizing the Archaic Future

(1998). The aim is not to develop a narrative of development but to see

how risk has become useful in shaping distinctly feminist visions of the

future. More specifically, I would like to see how risk-taking has enabled

feminist social dreaming. It is precisely this groundedness in risk that

allows feminist utopian visions to remain productive in popular culture

beyond feminist discourse. When, for example, the movie Alien (1979,

dir. Ridley Scott) introduced a female protagonist to a science fiction/

horror action plot, it drew on feminist utopian narrative patterns

grounded in risk and risk-taking. Feminist utopian visions as well as

their continuations in popular culture thus bring out the subversive

potential of risk for feminist theory and practice.

American Jour nal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 77, No. 5 (Novembe r, 2018).

DOI: 10 .1111/ajes.12252

© 2018 American Journ al of Economics and Sociology, Inc

*Professor of North American Studies at the University of Bayreuth. Published on

feminist science fiction and feminist religious thought. Her most recent book is on race/

ethnicity in 19th-century America, With a Barbarous Din (Winter, 2016). Currently

working on a project exploring technological risk and catastrophe in contemporary

dystopian/utopian science fiction, film, and graphic narrative. Email: jeanne.cortiel@

uni-bayreuth.de

1354 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

Do you really want to take risks? Inoculate yo urself with bubonic plague.

What foolishness! (Russ 1985: 148)

Introduct ion

Risk can be seen as a way of thinking that has served to domesticate

the future in the constant struggle to maximize profit and minimize loss.

Emerging from marine insurance and thoroughly grounded in capitalism,

such anticipatory thinking has—if one follows German sociologist Ulrich

Beck—taken over the world. It appears to channel all conceptualizations

of the future in a neoliberal logic of wins and losses. Risk constitutes

the anticipation of a catastrophe (Beck 2009: 9–10). However, it also

contains solid hope of avoiding or at least mitigating such a negative out-

come either through insurance or—if the risk is uninsurable—through

the human ability to calculate, predict, and invent. As with all attempts at

security, risk also comes with a particular set of anxieties associated with

the loss of control over the future. No wonder then, one might observe,

that recent popular American culture, in its multifaceted attempts to deal

with a world so prominently shaped by risk, has reveled in dystopia

rather than utopian visions, both in social thinking and in fiction.

As anticipation of the future, combined with the intention of impact-

ing the outcome of present action, risk is closely related to utopia. Like

risk that is connected with the maturing of modernity, “utopia,” the term

coined by Thomas More as the name of an imaginary place and the title

of his 1516 essay, inaugurated utopia as a literary genre. Etymologically,

utopia is grounded in speculation, it is “no place.” But as Lyman Tower

Sargent (1994: 5) has observed: “All fiction describes a no place; uto-

pian fiction generally describes good or bad no places.” Utopia is a spe-

cial kind of make-believe. While more broadly speaking, utopia simply

refers to the “desire for a better way of being” that has been common

to many cultures and has taken many forms as a specific form of spec-

ulation, it has come to be associated with the anticipatory thinking that

not only attends modernity but shapes it (Levitas 2010: 181).

This is the standard history of the rise of utopian fiction and risk

in the early modern period that accompanied long-distance maritime

trade and colonization. Yet this history gets a different twist when seen