“Join us on the Road Beyond Horizons”: Transforming Commercialized Human Futures in Outer Space

Abstract

Commercial interventions that enable private individuals to travel to outer space have become increasingly successful in recent years. Thanks to massive private investment, many of these endeavors are now beginning to materialize and may become reality in the future. This raises new, increasingly relevant questions for cultural geography. Which cosmic futures are imagined, which cosmic presents (re)produced?

The proposed presentation focuses on commercial actors’ imaginations of outer space, using poststructuralist-feminist perspectives. I will present findings from a qualitative analysis of the discourses that commercial space flight providers present, asking questions on the relations between humans, space, and technology, the inclusions and exclusions that these commercial narratives promote, as well as the power structures that they naturalize. Drawing on ideas of Donna Haraway and other contemporary feminist scholars, I then ask how these images and stories can be deconstructed and reconstructed in counter narratives from intersectional feminist positions. Thus, I introduce a framework of speculative-feminist utopias. These fragmentary utopias can be located in the now, rather than in distant futures, and thus aim to inspire a disruption of fixed discourses and a reflection on alternative imaginaries. The presentation concludes with an introduction to a participatory research on heterogeneous narratives of relating to the universe: Providing insight on a workshop on feminist speculation I show how coded narratives of the cosmos – both very distant and very close – are woven into its subjective material experience, and vice versa.