voluntary risk-taking and its pleasures

HEALTH, RISK & SOCIETY, VOL. 4, NO. 2, 2002

‘Life would be pretty dull without risk’:voluntary risk-taking and its pleasures

DEBORAH LUPTONa & JOHN TULLOCHb

Abstract Most writing in the social sciences on risk-taking tends to represent it as the product ofignorance or irrationality. The modern subject tends to be portrayed in this writing as risk-aversiveand fearful of risk, constantly seeking ways of avoiding it. While there has been an extensiveliterature on people’s perceptions of risk, little empirical research has attempted to investigate themeanings given to voluntary risk-taking: that is, risk-taking that is undertaken without coercion inthe full acknowledgement that risks are being confronted. In this article we present � ndings from ourqualitative research on a group of Australians’ risk knowledges and experiences, using in-depthinterviews to explore the meanings given to risk and the discourses used to express ideas about risk.We focus here on what our interviewees had to say about their experiences of, and views about,voluntary risk-taking. We identify and discuss three dominant discourses in our interviewees’accounts: those of self-improvement, emotional engagement and control. Our conclusion relates thesediscourses to wider discourses and notions about subjectivity and embodiment.

Key words: risk, voluntary risk-taking, sociological theory, perceptions of risk, discourse

Introduction

Most of the accounts of risk circulating in contemporary Western expert and popular culturesportray it as negative, something to be avoided. So too, much of the academic literature onrisk represents individuals in late modernity as living in fear, constantly dogged by feelings ofanxiety, vulnerability and uncertainty in relation to the risks of which they are constantlymade aware. For example, in� uential sociologists Ulrich Beck (1992, 1994, 1995) andAnthony Giddens (1990, 1994, 1998) have written about the so-called emergent ‘risk society’of late modernity, in which people are seen to be highly aware of, and worried about, risksand critical of the institutions that produce them. It has been contended that in both everydayand professionalised discourses, risk is now often a synonym for danger or hazard (Douglas,1992).

The emphasis in contemporary Western societies on the avoidance of risk is stronglyassociated with the ideal of the ‘civilised’ body, an increasing desire to take control over one’slife, to rationalise and regulate the self and the body, to avoid the vicissitudes of fate. To take

a School of Social Sciences and Liberal Studies, Charles Sturt University, Australia; b School of Journalism, Media andCultural Studies, University of Cardiff, Wales.

Address correspondence to: Deborah Lupton, 14 Arnold Street, Killara 2071, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]

ISSN 1369–8575 print/ISSN 1469-8331 online/02/020113–12 Ó 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/13698570220137015

114 DEBORAH LUPTON & JOHN TULLOCH

unnecessary risks is commonly seen as foolhardy, careless, irresponsible, and even ‘deviant’,evidence of an individual’s ignorance or lack of ability to regulate the self (Lupton, 1999).

Psychologists have been particularly interested in assessing and measuring the ways inwhich people respond to risk. Researchers investigating the psychology of decision makingand judgement use laboratory experiments, gaming situations and survey techniques tounderstand risk perception, attempting to arrive at a quantitative determination of riskacceptance. Many of these researchers, particularly those drawing on the work of Tversky andKahneman, have tended to represent lay people as de� cient in their abilities, drawing on‘irrational’ assumptions when making judgements about such phenomena as risk. In particu-lar, lay people’s ability to weigh up probabilities is seen as based on various heuristicprocesses that are regarded as leading to erroneous conclusions compared to statisticalmodels (Lopes, 1991).

Psychometric research into people’s notions of different types of risk have produced anumber of conclusions about the ways in which risk responses tend to be organised viaheuristics. It has been argued, for example, that people tend to see risks that are familiar orvoluntary as less serious than risks that are new or imposed upon them, and that they aremore likely to be concerned about risks that are rare and memorable than those that are seenas common but less disastrous (see, for example, Slovic, 1987; Hansson, 1989; Adams,1995). Recent research has emphasised the social and cultural differences that are evident indifferent groups’ assessments of risk. Finucane et al. (2000), for example, found that amongvarious American groups, whites were less concerned about a range of nominated risks thanwere non-whites, with white men the least concerned and non-white women the mostconcerned. They speculate that these differences emerged because of power differentials:those with more power and greatest socio-economic advantage (white men) are less likely tosee the world as dangerous than are others.

These � ndings are valuable in demonstrating that risk perceptions tend to form certainpatterns that are shaped by social and cultural norms. As such, they do acknowledge theimportance of ‘worldviews’ and acculturation, rather than reducing risk assessment toindividual perception. Such representations of the human actor, however, assume a universal,rational agent who is focused on avoiding risk, or else is ignorant in her or his assessment ofrisk. Socio-cultural meanings tend to be reduced to ‘bias’, contrasted with the supposedly‘neutral’ stance taken by experts in the � eld of risk assessment, against whose judgements layjudgements are compared and found wanting. Risk avoidance in this literature is typicallyportrayed as rational behaviour, while risk-taking is represented as irrational or stemmingfrom lack of knowledge or faulty perception. Douglas (1992: p. 13) has criticised thisapproach as portraying humans as ‘hedonic calculators calmly seeking to pursue privateinterests. We are said to be risk-aversive, but, alas, so inef� cient in handling information thatwe are unintentional risk-takers; basically we are fools.’

The notion that risk-taking may be intentional and rational seems unacceptable to thepsychometric approach. So too, in the sociological literature dominated by the writings ofBeck and Giddens, the human actor is portrayed as anxious about and fearful of risk, eagerto acquire knowledge so as to best avoid becoming the victim of risk. Despite the focus onrisk in the social sciences in recent years and increasing evidence that high-risk activities suchas those involved in ‘extreme’ sports or leisure activities are becoming more popular(Stranger, 1999), little empirical research has been carried out which has sought to investi-gate the meanings that people give to voluntary risk-taking. In voluntary risk-taking, theactivity in which individuals engage is perceived by them to be in some sense risky, but isundertaken deliberately and from choice. This might be contrasted, for example, with takingpart in activities that to the dominant culture are coded as ‘risky’ but are not perceived as

VOLUNTARY RISK-TAKING AND ITS PLEASURES 115

such by those involved, or in activities which are perceived by participants to be unacceptablyrisky but because of their circumstances have little choice of avoiding, or of which they areunaware at the time.

One exception to this lack of research is the literature on risk-taking in the context ofHIV/AIDS, which has offered some important insights into why people choose to engage incertain actions that are culturally coded as risky, such as unprotected sexual activity. Theimportance of ideas about ‘clean’/‘dirty’ in terms of how ‘contaminated’ one’s sexual partnersare likely to be has emerged as very strong in several studies (e.g. Maticka-Tyndale, 1992;Skidmore and Hayter, 2000). Central to these assessments are notions about Self and Other.It has been found that people tend to make assessments of potential partners based on suchattributes as their social class, appearance, social demeanour and whether or not they arejudged to be ‘like me’. Decisions about trust are established very quickly on this basis. Thisresearch is able to demonstrate that once people have undergone the evaluative process andjudged a potential partner as ‘safe’, then concerns about the risk of HIV infection aredissipated. Sex with that partner is no longer seen as ‘risky’.

What the above research does not clarify, however, is why people might voluntarilycontinue to engage in activities that they continue to see as ‘risky’. Studies of sky-divers(Lyng, 1990), surfers (Stranger, 1999), young male criminals (Collison, 1996), young menengaging in drinking and � ghting (Canaan, 1996) and female boxers (Hargreaves, 1997) haverevealed that voluntary risk-taking is often pursued for the sake of facing and conquering fear,displaying courage, seeking excitement and thrills and achieving self-actualisation and a senseof personal agency. It may also serve as a means of conforming to gender attributes that arevalued by the participants, or, in contrast, as a means of challenging gender stereotypes thatare considered restrictive and limiting of one’s agency or potential.

As these � ndings suggest, against the dominant discourses on risk that portray it as negativethere also exist counter discourses, in which risk-taking is represented far more positively. Itis upon these counter discourses that this article focuses, drawing on an empirical study thatinvolved interviews with Australians about their understandings and experiences of risk. Ourapproach to risk adopted a social constructionist position (Lupton, 1999) which recognisesthat knowledges about risks, including those of ‘experts’ on risk as well as those of lay people,are mediated through discourses, or social and cultural frameworks of understanding. Assuch, risk knowledges and meanings are dynamic, historical and contextual.

As we noted above, most psychological research, at least in recent times, has recognised theimportance of socio-cultural frameworks in risk assessment. Our approach differs in bothacknowledging the importance of discourse in the construction of risk epistemologies and inemphasising that all risk epistemologies are socially constructed, including those of ‘experts’.Rather than drawing a distinction between ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ (or ‘accurate’ and‘biased’) risk assessments, we prefer to concentrate on the meanings that are imputed to riskand how these meanings operate as part of people’s notions of subjectivity and their socialrelations. We also chose to use a qualitative rather than a quantitative methodology in ourattempt to identify the role played by risk epistemologies and experiences in people’severyday lives. A qualitative approach allows us to elicit to a greater depth the meaningsimputed to risk and risk-taking. Identifying the dominant discourses that inhere around riskin the talk of ‘experts’ and lay people and give it its meaning is a way of gaining access to thesocial and cultural frameworks in which we are interested. In so doing, we are drawing on thepoststructuralist understanding of the importance of language and discourse in constitutingmeaning and shaping subjectivity.

In another article (Lupton and Tulloch, 2002) we have analysed the ways in which theconcept of risk was de� ned by the participants in our study. We found that although risk was


often de� ned in negative ways as posing an unacceptable threat to physical, � nancial orpsychological well-being, several people also raised the positive aspects of voluntary risk-taking. Risk did tend to be associated with danger, uncertainty, threat and hazard, but theseattributes in certain contexts were seen as positive rather than negative. We take up theseissues in greater detail in the present article, focusing, in particular, on the discursivestrategies employed by our research participants in describing risk-taking and its pleasures.

Our study

A total of 74 people were interviewed for our study during 1997–98: 32 living in the Sydneyand Blue Mountains area, 28 in Wollongong and 14 in Bathurst.1 These locations, all in thestate of New South Wales, were chosen to provide diversity. Sydney is the largest city inAustralia and the Blue Mountains is an adjoining rural area known for its natural beauty,from which many people commute to Sydney and at which many Sydneysiders spend touristweekends. Wollongong is a large post-industrial city near Sydney currently adapting to thegradual erosion of its steel industry, and Bathurst is a small country town some 210 km westof Sydney.

The interviewees were recruited and interviewed by research assistants living in the locales,who used pre-existing social networks and snowball sampling for recruitment. The group ofinterviewees was dominated by well-educated, young and middle-aged adults of Britishancestry. Of the participants, 42 were female and 32 male. More than half (44) had at leastsome university education and a further seven participants held a trade or technicalquali� cation. Of the remainder, 2 had only completed the � nal year of high school, 16 didnot complete high school and 2 were still school students. Fifty-six participants were ofBritish ancestry. Of the remainder, 15 were of continental European ethnicity, 2 were ofLebanese ethnicity and 1 was Aboriginal. In terms of age, the group was concentrated aroundearly and middle adulthood: 8 were aged 20 or less, 20 were aged between 21 and 30, 19aged between 31 and 40, 13 aged between 41 and 50, 7 aged between 51 and 60 and 6 aged61 or over (one unknown).

We make no claims for generalisability of our � ndings to the Australian population as awhole. Nonetheless, we believe that the in-depth data that have emerged from the interviewsconducted with this group provide some important insights into the epistemologies anddiscourses that give meaning to risk among ‘non-experts’.

Each participant was interviewed individually using a semi-structured interview schedule,except for two group discussions comprised of four university students in Sydney and asimilar group in Wollongong. The questions asked of participants were directed at elicitingtheir views and experiences of risk in relation to their personal biographies, so as tocontextualise risk in their everyday lives. They were asked to de� ne risk, to describe the risksthey saw as threatening themselves personally, both in the past and the present, andthreatening Australians in general, how they had learnt about risks and who or what they sawas the cause of risks. Our analytical emphasis was on key themes, narratives, de� nitions,discourses, personal/social histories, rhetorical and expressive devices and so on, emergingfrom the transcribed interviews. In particular, we wished to identify the meanings that ourinterviewees gave to the concept of ‘risk’, the ways in which they identi� ed risks as affectingthemselves and how they sought to express these ideas using speci� c discursive strategies.

1. This research was funded by Large Grant awarded to the authors by the Australian Research Council. Later researchincluded interviews with Britons: see Lupton and Tulloch (forthcoming) for a full analysis of the data from both Australianand British interviewees.


The following discussion, in analysing the meanings given by the participants to voluntaryrisk-taking, addresses the three dominant discourses that emerged in their accounts: those ofself-improvement, emotional engagement and control.

The discourse of self-improvement

When analysing the interview data, it became clear that metaphors of spatiality were animportant conceptual tool employed by people when they talked about the voluntaryrisk-taking in which they engaged. When asked about the kinds of risks they took and whythey did so, the research participants commonly expressed the notion of risk as locatedoutside a de� ned boundary. For example, 35-year-old Sonya, who lives in Wollongong andworks in the home, said that: ‘I think risk is stepping out of your comfort zone and leavingfamiliar territory and going off into the unknown, or doing something you haven’t donebefore.’ Martin, a 46-year-old clergyman also living in Wollongong, expressed his idea ofrisk-taking as transgressing the barriers de� ning safety and security. In his case, as a ministerof religion, risk-taking involves taking a public principled stand on social matters he thinksneed redressing. Again, Martin used spatial metaphors to express this, drawing in particularon those connoting a war zone. He said:

I’m a risk junkie in some respects, in as much that I like wandering out there inno-man’s-land, behind the barriers. Every now and again it’s worthwhile to retreatback in behind the safe barriers. But life would be pretty dull without risk, and Ienjoy those opportunities.

As Sonya’s and Martin’s words suggest, risk lies outside the ‘comfort zone’ and familiarterritory. It represents that which lies beyond the known: ‘no-man’s-land’, as Martin put it.Lyng’s (1990) writings on ‘edgework’ also employ a vivid spatial metaphor to describerisk-taking. To engage in edgework, the term suggests, is to teeter on the brink of something,to balance precariously on a sharply de� ned boundary, to peer into the abyss. Indeed, Lyngemphasises that edgework takes place around cultural boundaries such as those between lifeand death, consciousness and unconsciousness, ordinary and extraordinary.

In some of the interviews the notion of risk-taking as imparting a momentum to thetrajectory of one’s life, facilitating movement from an ontological stasis, the feeling of being‘bogged down’, was evident. This appeared in the words of 54-year-old Lorraine, a Bathurstuniversity student, who noted that: ‘I’m not saying there are things out there that weshouldn’t do, but if you don’t take a risk in your life somewhere along the way, I don’t thinkyou’ll get anywhere. I think you’ll just stay put.’ This idea of risk-taking as movement extendsthe spatial metaphor temporally. One crosses boundaries when taking risks, moving from onespace to another. It is risk-taking that impels movement and progression.

Sometimes the notion of risk as movement may be both literal and metaphor, as in the caseof Eric, who had twice moved his home location, from South Africa to Britain and then toAustralia. Eric, a 44-year-old health promoter, described these migrations as the ‘biggestrisks’ he had undertaken:

The biggest [risks] are the effect of a decision to move somewhere, somewhere awayfrom where I felt extremely supported and comfortable. So they had to do withimmigration, and I’ve immigrated twice: I’ve moved in my early twenties away fromSouth Africa to England and in my forties from England to Australia. Those werethe � rst two biggest risks I’ve ever taken in my life. The feeling of nervousness and


trepidation and concern and the unknown were just on one level quite fantastic andon the other very scary.

Eric had found that his � rst geographical ‘comfort zone’—a ‘sleepy English’ university townin South Africa—was itself a place of severe ideological constraint. His university education,featuring Marxist thinking, transformed him from an unthinking supporter of apartheid intoits opponent, and he felt impelled to leave the country. In Britain he encountered new risks,relinquished other ‘comfort zones’ as he discovered his gay identity and came out. Now,having moved to Australia, he was experiencing the outcome of sexual risk-taking of the1980s, as he saw most of his friends dying of AIDS. Yet Eric continued, despite his loneliness(two partners have died), to value both his ideological and sexual transformations.

Both Eric’s and Lorraine’s accounts of their own risk-taking point to the notion ofrisk-taking as a form of work upon the self. For Eric, the risk-taking involved in migrating andcoming out had its rewards in living in a country where freedom of expression and thoughtare allowed, something he valued highly, and where he felt able to express and act upon hissexual desires. He felt that his authentic self—the self that is anti-apartheid, interested insocial justice and gay—could be expressed via his risky decision to leave his country of originand migrate elsewhere.

In Lorraine’s interview, she described risk-taking as a form of feminist protest against theconventions that restrict girls and women in their lives. In her case, growing up in the countryin the 1950s, such restrictions were imposed particularly by her parents: ‘Being a girl, youhave to take risks by trying to overcome the taboos that [limit] women.’ In her own life, shesaid, as a young girl she chose to deliberately court risks when riding her horse, and also bytaking up cigarette smoking and drinking alcohol. In doing so, she was ‘going against [her]parents’ wishes’ and thereby challenging restrictions they sought to impose upon her.

Ron is 60, unemployed, and living in Bathurst. In his younger days he enjoyed riding inrodeos, a physical activity that posed great threats to life and limb. He discussed the bene� tsand pleasures he saw as gaining from this experience:

I’m thinking probably the most focused risk-taking, where you really can’t predictwhat might be the outcome of the activity at all, is riding in a rodeo, which I did overabout a two-year period, and each experience is unique and absolutely unpredict-able. What it is that you get from success is a degree of personal satisfaction andself-esteem as a result of taking, accepting a risk and being successful. And if yousaid to me, you know, ‘Is it worth it?’, I’d have to say ‘Yes!’. It’s part of the wholeprocess of becoming the person that you � nally � nish being, presenting oneself inanother way. And it’s a totally different context, and it might sound silly to say it,but it has some comparisons with say, taking an examination where you front upand if you succeed there is a degree of personal self-satisfaction as a result ofwhatever is the end result.

Ron’s account is clear about the ways in which he conceptualises this particular risk-takingactivity as contributing to his sense of accomplishment and, indeed, to the continuing processof developing self-identity. For him, rodeo-riding was a means of testing himself anddemonstrating to himself the limits of his skills. So too, Lyng (1990) found that for theedgeworkers he spoke to, who engaged in parachute jumping, the notions of ‘self-realisation’,‘self-actualisation’ and ‘self-determination’ were commonly claimed as goals of their danger-ous physical activity. According to Lyng (1990: p. 860): ‘In the pure form of edgework,individuals experience themselves as instinctively acting entities, which leaves them with apuri� ed and magni� ed sense of self.’


Chloe, a 39-year-old artist who lives in the inner city of Sydney, talked about a differentkind of risk-taking that achieves the same ends. Chloe said that she does not take risksinvolving placing herself in physical peril: ‘I de� nitely do not seek out physical sport sort ofphysical risks. I’m very conscious that I don’t do that. I’m not adventurous in that way, likeI’ve never been abseiling, I’ve never been parachuting, you know, any of those sorts of things,white water rafting.’ When she talked about her own voluntary risk-taking, Chloe focusedinstead on the relationship between artistic creativity and risk in both her teaching and herown art:

I encourage people in my workshops, my creativity workshops, to take risks. If thosepeople are doing a painting or whatever, and someone—I’ll just give you a littleexample. Someone got to a point recently in a painting where she said, ‘Oh, I keepgetting stuck at this point and I’m afraid I’ll mess it up.’ And I encouraged her todo the thing that might mess up the painting, take that risk. And she did it and itwas a real breakthrough. And I think I tend to do that creatively, in creative areas.Whether it be in painting or whatever the creative expression, I push myself to takethose risks. The risk of stuf� ng the whole thing up.

Like Lorraine, Chloe’s notion of the bene� ts of risk-taking includes the opportunity to gobeyond accepted convention. For her artistry, risk-taking is essential to transcend thebanalities of ‘niceness’ and super� ciality. Although her risk-taking is related to art rather thanphysical danger, Chloe experiences the same sorts of pleasures from it. She extends herselfbeyond usual boundaries, she is able to achieve self-actualisation and transformation:

The buzz of excitement when you do that daring thing or whatever, that cantransform, I think that’s often where the energy is. It’s hard to describe it, but Ithink there’s often a lot of energy and aliveness in taking a risk—that sort of risk. Imean maybe that’s the case with any risk-taking: I’m just thinking about painting atthe moment. Yeah, it seems to release energy and helps and often, yeah, it’s likepushing the boundaries, going further. You know, it can add depth to what you’recreating which might have just been a bit sort of ‘nice’. Too nice, or super� cial orwhatever before doing that. So there’s something transformative about it.

The discourse of self-improvement in relation to risk-taking bespeaks the cultural importanceplaced on knowing and monitoring the state of one’s self, on movement and progression ofthis self, on � exibility and adaptability (Martin, 1994). As Daniel, a 39-year-old Sydneysider,put it: ‘I don’t think that you can live life fully without placing yourself in a risky situation.I don’t think that you can really fully � nd your own full potential without taking risks.’ Theboundaries here concern the boundaries of the self: that which is deemed possible in termsof self-realisation and expanding one’s life experiences.

The discourse of emotional engagement

Risk-taking is also fundamentally associated with emotion. To be confronted with risks thatone does not choose to take is to experience ‘fear, nervousness, discomfort’, as 44-year-oldSydneysider Raymond put it. But to deliberately take a risk may also be to seek a heighteneddegree of emotional intensity that is pleasurable in its ability to take us out of the here-and-now, the mundane, everyday nature of life. As Martin contended: ‘I think risk is good in asmuch as that at least it stimulates the adrenalin. Risk is adventurous, challenging, exciting.’And according to Pete, a 35-year-old crane-driver from Wollongong: ‘The bigger the risk themore excitement. Even when you take out a mortgage it’s exciting, even though it’s a risk.’


It is clear from some people’s accounts that vivid awareness of the risks they are facing isan important part of the pleasure of taking part in certain activities. Anna, a 56-year-old videoproducer from Sydney, enjoys bike riding and has spent many years participating in roadracing. The risks associated with this sport were recently brought home to her when she washit by a car when racing and was badly injured. As she said: ‘Quite clearly I take a risk everytime I put my helmet and my gear on and I go out there and ride 80 kilometres, get passedby trucks and cars and I’m on a bicycle. It’s clearly a risk. I’m aware of that.’

Anna went on to say that, despite this experience and her knowledge of the risks, she isprepared to continue to take them. Her account of why she does so draws attention to thepleasure she feels in risk-taking, including the opportunity to feel as if she is part of a widerworld of intrepid and skilful risk-takers:

It’s a very important aspect of my life and sometimes it’s an interesting part of a lotof risks. I mean sometimes it’s almost like the risk is part of the attraction in a wayas well … Until recently I raced veteran racing, and it gives me an enormous thrill.I mean, the whole thing about racing and watching Tour de France on televisionand sort of living that world and there’s fantasy involved.

Stephen, a 39-year-old librarian in Bathurst, talked about the pleasure he experiences whensur� ng in rough seas in these terms:

Sometimes you want to take a risk because of the adrenalin buzz and all that sortof stuff. Sometimes it’s unintentional, but still, when you’re in the throes of it, likebeing dumped by a huge wave, you still could be potentially killed or whatever, butit’s still a great rush … Even though you might be dumped by a wave and you mightgo ‘Wow, yeah, I can feel the forces of this wave just ripping through me!’. And it’secstasy sort of stuff, it’s still a discovery. And that’s where you get the elation, andI don’t think you’d get elation without taking a risk.

Stephen’s words, which impart an almost erotic meaning to the experience of sur� ng, suggestthat an important aspect of risk-taking is the opportunity it offers to allow a ‘swept-away’feeling. Risk-taking is a form of release in his account. His representation of the joys ofrisk-taking in sur� ng are echoed in the words of surfers interviewed by Stranger (1999), whoalso referred to the sensuality of the ultimate sur� ng experience, the link they perceivedbetween thrill, desire and danger. Like Stephen, those surfers commonly referred to thesublime nature of feeling ‘one with the wave’ through their exploits.

The emotional intensity of risk-taking may also be associated with a feeling of communityand camaraderie with one’s fellow participants. Jason is a 27-year-old courier from Sydney.In his interview he described some activities he undertook as a youth with friends, involvingminor vandalism at his school (they broke in and moved some furniture from one room toanother). In Jason’s account, the link between the emotional pleasures of this deed and hisrelationship with his friends is explicit:

Oh it was quite fun. A sense of adventure, actually carrying out the [furniture]removal end. I don’t know, it was fun, a group of guys all doing something together,and I don’t know, just experimenting with risk. It was fun and at that age wewouldn’t have been exposed to it as much. And at that age deciding I was going toexpose myself to risk, and I don’t know why it’s so good, but when you do it it’s likea drug, you know. Like the driving, the speeding, the drinking and anything elserisky you do then, it’s just fantastic. It’s just a rush I suppose.

These accounts suggest that participating in activities that are coded as dangerous or ‘risky’


can bring an adrenalin rush that allows a� cionados to escape the bounds of the rational mindand controlled body, to allow the body’s sensations and emotions to overcome them for atime. There is a sense of heightened living, of being closer to nature than culture, of breakingthe ‘rules’ that we see society as imposing upon us. Here again selfhood is important. Theemotions produced by risk-taking are seen to give access to authenticity of selfhood byconfronting the barriers of convention or social expectation.

The discourse of control

In some of the accounts privileging the emotional intensity of risk-taking, there is a sense thatthe pleasures of risk stem from loss of control over the body. It is clear, however, that thereare few situations in which we totally lose the desire to retain some degree of control over ourbodies. This is evident in the account of Brian, a 51-year-old businessman living in Sydney,who enjoys sailing on that city’s harbour in his spare time. Brian said that he saw the riskshe took as part of this pursuit to be within his control and therefore as pleasurable. He drewa clear distinction between voluntary and involuntary risk in his account:

I think that [sailing is] associated with a sense of control and it’s a calculated riskyou see? I mean, in some sense it’s very controlled because you have control overyour welfare, as opposed to sitting in an aeroplane with someone. I think maybe thatmight be as good an example as anything of my understanding of risk, where yourwellbeing is in the hands of someone you don’t know. And yet I suppose the generalpopulation would accept driving a bus or a ferry or a plane or public transport ora taxi driver, and accept it and feel quite safe. I guess that’s where I feel at risk, whenI’m not in control.

Brian later in the interview went on to describe how he feels in control when facing risks insailing:

On the one hand you don’t have control of the elements, but then you do havecontrol over the preparation of your vessel and you do take it on as an intellectualchallenge, to deal with the problems that are going to arise. And I suppose only achallenge because there’s a risk involved. So there you have it. I mean, you know,I suppose here I think back to situations where you end up in an extreme situation.Where you’ve gone out for a nice sail or to get from A to B or whatever, and it startsoff � ne and then suddenly a storm comes along and suddenly it’s not so pleasant anymore. And then it gets downright unpleasant and then you’re going to get cold andthen you’re going to start worrying about the boat and things go wrong. And sothen, you know, it gets a risky sort of situation. Now the thrill comes from havingto turn around a position of being, feeling vulnerable, uncomfortable, unhappy anddeal with it and take control.

Daniel also talked in a similar fashion about the pleasure of control over danger as part ofrisk-taking. Although he represents himself as a cautious type, taking care to drive carefullyand look after his health, there are certain times when he allows his caution to slip somewhat.Daniel works in theatre production, and must climb ladders on occasions to check lightingarrangements. He said that he has a fear of falling off ladders and is generally very carefulwhen using them. But sometimes he � nds himself testing his fear and deliberately takingrisks: ‘Occasionally when I’m up on a ladder I get a bit reckless and I � nd myself balancingup in the ceilings of theatres on lighting bars, having stepped off the ladder onto the lightingbars. And I’m actually quite scared about what might happen and what the result might be.’


Daniel went on to explain what he got out of this risk-taking: ‘Balancing on a bar thirty feetoff the ground and continuing to work for a little while, and then escaping from that situationand making your way back down to some sort of solid � oor, can give me a feeling that I’mvery much in control of my body. And that is a very nice feeling really, I like that feeling.’

Anna described the sense of control she achieved from taking physical risks in her youth,despite suffering quite serious injury:

I can remember we were living in northern Europe and living in the ’50s, early ’50s,we had no heating except fuel stoves. And it was always my task to chop the woodat autumn time, and the wood then got stacked in the outhouse and would dry. AndI was very skilled, I’ve always been very skilled with my hands, and I would, I meanI was probably 12, and I would use an axe with great skill and I would just chopthese logs, and I would do it very quickly. And that’s where I lost a bit of my thumband the axe went into my hand another time. I mean they were sort of risks, I knewI was going far too fast, but I got a pleasure out of using that skill, and I felt incontrol.

Voluntary risk-taking, for these people, is inherently implicated in their notions of theboundaries of their bodies, how far they feel they can push themselves, how well they canconquer their emotions of fear and feelings of vulnerability. They are engaging in edgeworkthat allows them to experience an intensi� ed body awareness but that also contributes to theirsense of being able to control their bodies. Even within the meanings of edgework, controlof the body remains a central preoccupation. Edgework is also characterised by an emphasison skilled performance of the dangerous activity, involving the ability to maintain control overa situation that verges on complete chaos, that requires, above all, ‘mental toughness’, theability not to give in to fear. Cultivated risk-taking in this context is seen to provide anopportunity for individuals to display courage, to master fear, to prove something tothemselves which allows them to live life with a sense of personal agency.

Conclusion

Our study revealed three major discourses employed by our participants to describe thepleasures and bene� ts of voluntary risk-taking. The discourse of self-improvement wasemployed to describe the importance of working on the continuing project of the self throughtaking risks, while the discourse of emotional engagement drew on a neo-Romantic ideal ofthe body/self allowed to extend itself beyond the strictures of culture and society (Lupton,1998).The third discourse, that of control, in some way counters that of emotional engage-ment in privileging control over one’s emotions and bodily responses as a valued aspect ofengaging in risky activities. All three discourses represent a life without risk as too tightlybounded and restricted, as not offering enough challenges.

These discourses are also underpinned by contemporary ideas about the importance ofidentity and selfhood. The notion of risk-taking as contributing to self-development, self-actualisation, self-authenticity and self-control is part of a wider discourse that privileges theself as a continuing project that requires constant work and attention. Risk-taking, in thiscontext, becomes a particular ‘practice of the self’ (Foucault, 1988), a means by whichsubjectivity is expressed and developed according to prevailing moral and ethical values.

Further, the use of spatial metaphors in talk about risk-taking demonstrates the importanceof the concept of cultural boundaries in thinking about the body, self and social relations.Mary Douglas’s (1966) work on purity and danger highlights the integral role played byconceptual boundaries in constructing ideas of Self against those of the Other. She argues


that it is particularly at the margins of the body and society that concerns and anxieties aboutpurity and danger are directed. Because margins mark and straddle boundaries, they areliminal and therefore dangerous, requiring high levels of policing and control. This is why wetend to think of risk-taking as involving the transgression of boundaries; and why there maybe an additional sense of self-improvement when policed boundaries are crossed. That whichlies beyond the boundaries of the Self—that is, the domain of Otherness—is risky. Risk isdangerous, but also exciting, in its lack of certainty and challenging of the borders betweenthe known and the unknown.

The discourses employed by people when describing their risk-taking speak of intensity ofemotion and embodied sensation, of movement, � ows and waves that break down or crosscultural boundaries. These tropes suggest that the pleasures invoked by risk-taking for someare also implicated with transgression of the ‘civilised’ body image. Against the ideal of thehighly controlled ‘civilised’ body/self is the discourse which valorises escape from the bondsof control and regulation, which hankers after the pleasures of the ‘grotesque’ body, the bodythat is more permeable and open to the world. This discourse rejects the ideal of thedisembodied rational actor for an ideal of the self that emphasises heightened sensualembodiment—the visceral and emotional � ights produced by encounters with danger. Thetransgression it involves is pleasurable because of its association with the dangerous, theforbidden, the polluting, the contaminated, the disorderly, the carnivalesque. The very fear,anxiety and disquiet aroused by these cultural categories are implicated in the excitementgenerated by confronting these feelings and ‘crossing over’ to the other side, at least for atime.

Yet, as we have argued, risk-taking is not only about loss of control over the body/self. Forsome people, notions of control remain central to risk-taking and are an important part of itspleasures. Indeed, if successfully undertaken without disaster striking, voluntary risk-takingcan lead to a greater sense of control, resulting in a feeling of accomplishment and agency.Risk-taking, therefore, is far more complex than is suggested in the traditional social scienti� cliterature. It may be based just as much on knowledge—of the self, of one’s own bodilycapacities and desires—as on ignorance.

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