In March 2010, the Women’s Campaign Fund (WCF), the only non-partisan venture capitalist organization supporting women leaders in the United States at all levels of office, premiered Voices from the Ladder at Christie’s, the art auction house in Manhattan. Dressed in colorful jackets and black slacks, approximately a dozen high-ranking women positioned themselves at the tops of ladders as part of a performance piece demonstrating women’s unequal representation in government. The WCF was, in part, trying to make a statement that putting more women into office would save the nation from the recession; the audience of mostly political and financial female elites applauded enthusiastically. The performance tapped into gendered debates about the origins and solutions to the 2008 financial crisis. Like other accounts disseminated through different types of media circulating at the time, it articulated a divide between masculine, greedy, risk-taking financial behavior that fostered the zombie economy and caused the crisis, and a more feminine, risk-averse, conservative approach that would fix the crisis.
Six years later, in May 2016, radical choreographer Elizabeth Streb spoke at the New York University’s Women’s Leadership Forum on How to Become an Extreme Action Heroine. Clad in her signature dark men’s suit and boots, she regaled us with stories and images of herself and her dancers performing on the London Eye during the 2012 Olympics “at night, after the economy closes” so that people could watch. Throughout her talk Streb asked us to re-think the meaning of risk-taking and to find a new language for taking action. She asked: “Can risk ever be planned? … Isn’t risk something that doesn’t occur to you ever to do?” She pushed us to think about how bodies, including our own, move through the world and generate new ways of being - and I argue, how bodies thus enact gender, risk, and the economy.
