Recent Trends of Woman in Modernism the Legacies of Risk Possibility

This introductory essay for the Australian Feminist Studies special issue on Modernist Women and Risk examines the changing fortunes of risk for feminist aesthetic and political work. It considers how risk in the work of modernist women intellectuals, writers and artists prompts us to imagine what it might mean in the twenty-first century to ‘risk anything’?The pervasive association of ‘risk’ with a neoliberal agenda of individual responsibility and the calculated governance of our everyday micro-pathologies might well suggest that the concept of risk is now far removed from the aesthetic and political ethos of modernism. Premised on the idea of novelty, uncertainty, disruption, and reinvention, risk, for modernism represented an almost indispensable condition of creative production although risk in the work and lives of modernist women, let alone queer modernist women, presents another layer of complexity to the broader contours of modernist experimentation, since the very condition of creative production was in itself a gendered enterprise in the early decades of the twentieth century: ideologically, aesthetically and materially. As we have moved to ever more liquid forms of modernity, risk is no longer associated with an automatic negation and tearing down as the precondition for social, political and aesthetic renewal. Rather risk has become something to be managed via the rhetoric of individual harm and grievance as a bulwark against endemic uncertainty and precarity. The liquidity of our world, felt through super diversity, intensified forms of digital communication, financialisation, and the new challenges that they pose, has meant that we are all now risk adverse rather than risk-takers in ways that Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck perhaps never imagined. With this in mind, the historical valency of risk in relation to modernist women’s literary, artistic, and intellectual enterprises might be a surprisingly fertile optic with which to not simply scour the extant ruins of modernism, but to illuminate the fortunes and legacies of ‘risk’ for feminist political and intellectual work in the present.