Space Feminisms

Abstract

This book examines how scientific, popular, scholarly, and artistic imaginations of outer space have, since the 1950s, reflected and embedded Earthly hopes, anxieties, and futures. Rather than simply a platform for imagining the future, this book sees outer space as a material reality that reflexively encodes humans’ self-perceptions of their planet and beyond. Employing a global approach to feminist theory, Space Feminisms cultivates radical and alternative modes of inquiry around outer space. It contains essays from leading scholars working across the space sciences, art, and anthropology, artworks and texts by contemporary artists working in the field of space art, and interviews with NASA astronauts past and present. In doing so, it draws new connections between feminist thought and extraterrestrial power structures, as it inspects the transformation of terrestrially held notions of gender, race, and class as they migrate to the extraterrestrial. This book makes a radical enquiry into how earthly power structures are already expanding into and colonising our skies, facilitating a collaborative and interdisciplinary platform for scholars, artists, and designers to imagine radical constructions of human futures beyond Earth. At the intersection of scientific, cultural, social, and artistic speculations, Space Feminisms gathers leading scholars, scientists, artists, and designers to develop innovative tactics and disruptive participations to create generative, alternative, and careful futures of and in outer space. Why explore space through feminism? We are presently witnessing the transformations of postwar logics of the Space Age—masculinist, militaristic, colonialist, capitalist, ableist—as extraterrestrial projects are privatized, as space accelerates as a site of international power, and activists clamber for greater representation. Space Feminisms proposes new theories and methods to cultivate how we might inhabit outer space, build inclusive technology for both Earth and outer space, and reimagine human futures in the cosmos. This multimedia collection of scholarly essays, artistic provocations, speculative designs for off-Earth living, and interviews with women astronauts, diagrams our past, present, and future spacescapes from essential feminist perspectives.