Space Feminisms

Employing a global approach to feminist theory, this book examines how scientific, popular, scholarly, and artistic imaginations of space have, since the 1950s, reflected and embedded Earthly hopes, anxieties, and futures. Rather than simply a platform for imagining the future, it cultivates radical and alternative modes of inquiry around space through seeing space as a material reality that reflexively encodes humans’ self-perceptions of their planet and beyond. Bringing together essayistic reflections, artworks, and interviews with space scientists, engineers, and astronauts past and present in one volume, Space Feminisms inspects the transformation of terrestrially held notions of gender, race, class, and ableism as they migrate to the extraterrestrial, whilst drawing new connections between feminist thought and extraterrestrial power structures. Space Feminisms makes a radical enquiry into how earthly power structures are already expanding into 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, the book gathers leading scholars, scientists, artists, and designers to develop innovative tactics and disruptive participations to create generative, alternative, and radical futures of and in 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.