ABSTRACT
As I observed in earlier chapters, many theoretical discussions of risk tend not to acknowledge the differentiation of the targeting and effects of risk discourses on specific social groups. They represent the risk actor, in many cases, as lacking a gender, age, ethnicity, social class or sexual identity. Statements about risk and subjectivity tend to elide differences, presenting the risk subject as universal. Beck claims that in risk society, the globalized and therefore ‘democratic’ nature of risks is such that the propensity to identify the Other as the source of danger recedes: ‘The “end of the Other”, the end of all our carefully cultivated opportunities for distancing ourselves, is what we have become able to experience with the advent of nuclear and chemical contamination’ (Beck 1992a:109). A close examination of the ways in which risk discourses operate as strategies of normalization, of exclusion and inclusion, however, demonstrates that this is not the case. Notions of Otherness remain central to ways of thinking and acting about risk.
