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Departmental Colloquium Series
Greta Krippner, "Race, Gender, HIV and the Individualization of Risk"
Monday November 25th, 2024 at 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building & Via Zoom
Abstract:
This talk traces the history of the individualization of risk in American society, asking how risk
was transformed from being understood as a property of groups to being understood as a
property of individuals. While it is conventional to locate this development in the “personal
responsibility revolution” orchestrated by neoliberal policy entrepreneurs beginning in the 1980s,
I argue here that the individualization of risk is better understood as the cumulative result of
movements for inclusion that sought to gain access to markets for risk for those who had been
excluded from them on the basis of race, gender, and HIV status over the course of the twentieth
century. I elaborate on this argument using the case of feminist mobilization against insurers’ risk
classification practices to explain how anti-discrimination movements seeded the
individualization of risk. I conclude by putting this paradoxical finding in conversation with a
broader literature on “left neoliberalism,” asking whether it is possible to recover the
emancipatory possibilities of anti-discrimination movements from their entanglement with
neoliberal trajectories.