Space Feminisms: People, Planets, Power

(Hardback)

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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. In doing so, 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.

Author Bio

Marie-Pier Boucher is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology, University of Toronto, Canada. She is co-editor of Being Material (2019), Heteropolis (2013), and Adaptive Actions Madrid (2010). Claire Webb is a Fellow at the Berggruen Institute and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California, USA. Annick Bureaud is an art critic, curator and Director of Leonardo/Olats, Paris, France. Nahum Romero is the founder of the Berlin-based KOSMICA Institute, and a Faculty member at the International Space University in France and at the transnational University of the Underground.