To think of risk in modern societies is to be submerged in androcentric notions that intrinsically link it to heteronormative gender and sexual identities. Risks are neither masculine nor to do with the objective-rational discourse of the modern White man. Examining women’s everyday worlds in Banaras, North India, I argue that women are risk-takers and theorize on the intersectional ways in which risk-taking becomes an everyday practice. Banaras is populated with regnant literature of sacredness, mysticism, and antiquity. The paper distances itself from the rhetoric of the extraordinary city and examines women's perseverance in producing social worlds as they navigate the city in the everyday. Relatedly, the everyday becomes a site of oppression and liberation where women’s intersectional ways of being are produced. Thus, intersectional risk-taking evidence the ways in which caste, class, religion, age, and marital status operate to determine the risks taken. Intersectional risktaking is analyzed through modalities of imposed and chosen risks. These two modes are fluid and contingent on the social realities of a woman’s life. Furthermore, women’s risk-taking is examined concomitantly with my risk-taking as an ethnographer postulated as ambivalent risks. Risk in such conception becomes tactical and inadvertent for the marginalized. Thus, to critically analyze women as risk-takers through varied modalities while creating a dialogue between the interlocutor and ethnographer’s risk is to bring forth nuanced and complex ways in which women subvert patriarchal control and containment underpinned by surveillance.
