Abstract
This article examines the raced, gendered, and classed world of UFO-related media with the intention of assessing its potential as a form of resistance. I use as a case study the largest crowdsourced documentary of all time, Sirius (2013), which explores exotic technologies and the exploits of ufologist, Dr. Steven Greer. Sirius’s affiliates conducted immaterial, post-Fordist labor to distribute the environmentally conscious film online, yet despite their progressive, utopian bent, they indicate that any technologies associated with the film will operate under market logic. Moreover, Sirius recycles racially fraught tropes of UFO culture, such as reflecting white ufologists’ desire to experience the Other or subject to understanding a gray race of beings they fear has challenged their racially privileged status.
Highlights
This journal is published by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press
I use Dr Steven Greer and the 2013 film he sanctioned, Sirius, which the producers have billed as “the largest crowdfunded documentary in history.”2 Sirius is a rich text to analyze but representative of the broader UFO culture as well
I chose to examine the raced and classed consequences of the UFO culture’s actions and the way these have been mediated through Sirius
Summary
Cultural theorist John Fiske argued that in a late-capitalist society, ways of understanding the world are poststructural in nature, meaning that diverse actors from different raced and classed backgrounds can converge to articulate and defend a position or take a side only to disappear after having secured alliances. The book is rife with high literary epigraphs and the eloquent prose of a professional author, which Strieber was and is In this reading, his experience illustrates the unconscious attempt by white males to protect their position atop the social hierarchy as a black-eyed and grey (or in his case, more tan) race exceeds them technologically. Thinking back to Strieber, the notion that extraterrestrials have the capacity to dominate the oppressive white race surfaces elsewhere too, namely in the belief structure of the Nation of Islam, in Black Afrofuturist music, and in Australian Aboriginal culture In these instances, the cosmos and its interplanetary beings are deliberately and rhetorically called upon as a strategy of Black empowerment.
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