I. Queer Lives in Orbit

When I began writing this, there were nine people living in outer space from five countries, as best as I can determine they are all cis-gendered, heterosexual men from the dominant ethnic/racial group of their nation (please astronauts, correct me if I’m wrong here).

Crew of the International Space Station as of September 11, 2015 (via Twitter)

When the NASA space station motto declares “Off the Earth, For the Earth” we need to ask: which Earth? whose Earth? Beyond representation and tokenism which assumes “people of color” have a common racialized experience, we need to look to sciences where women, people of color, queer people, and others are fighting against great odds to participate in disciplines, be treated as colleagues, and have any visibility when we do.

Sally Ride, the first American woman in space (wikipedia)

Astronaut Sally Ride was queer, a fact that wasn’t publicly revealed until after her death. Of 330 American astronauts, that means one has been identified as queer, and only after death. Part of this is certainly related to the fact that most astronauts came to the program through the military, which until recently didn’t allow queer identity to exist openly. This begs further and obvious questions about what we are bringing to space, what kind of culture? What ideas, traditions, and practices? Are they exclusively military? And what does that mean for our futures in space?

Physician and astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison, the first black woman in space.

If expressions of personal identity are seen as running counter to “scientific neutrality,” and are marginalized within science because of that — we have only to look to the history of science to see how un-neutral this normative notion of neutrality is. And how counterproductive this is for science and creativity (e.g., Kuhn on paradigms and scientific revolutions), and for honoring, respecting, and learning from indigenous knowledge and wisdom about the Earth and about space.

John Herrington (left) the first enrolled member of a Native American tribe to fly in space. (photo: Mount Royal University)

Why shouldn’t expression, affect, sensitivity, and identity be a part of our movement into space? Aren’t we, in some sense, coming out as a species onto a galactic or even universe-scale stage? And aren’t we a diverse species, a colorful, even queer species with all of our material, emotional, architectural, technological accoutrement, and other fascinations?

Perhaps we’ve been out for a while as a species, since our television and radio transmissions started leaving Earth and heading out into interstellar space. Although those transmissions started with Hitler and are currently mostly about Donald Trump and Kim Davis. So, when we talk about sending messages to alien civilizations, we may also want to talk about what we’re already saying.

Carl Sagan talked about, quite rightly, how similar we all are when seen from space. And in my field of anthropology there are many debates about what it means to look at universals vs. particulars. Is focusing on difference a problem for justice and universal rights? We need to think about similarities, many will argue, not difference. But sometimes the way we think about and promote similarity serves to erase differences — serves to whitewash, straightwash, genderwash, abilitywash people in an attempt to say that universal humanity is somehow represented by nine able-bodied, cis men floating in the International Space Station. But it isn’t.

In Pale Blue Dot (1994), Carl Sagan wrote about the profound photograph of Earth taken from 3.7 billion miles away by the Voyager I spacecraft:

Pale Blue Dot: Earth, the small dot in the top beam of light. Photo: NASA JP

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, ever king and peasant, every young couple in love, every moth and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

But it’s not just everyone you know and everyone you’ve heard of — it’s everyone you don’t know, everyone you’ve never heard of — all the marginalized, muffled, silenced, timid, and erased voices. All the many kinds of queer voices of Earth are also there, suspended in that sunbeam.

This is why we have to stake a claim in the territory of space programs now. We need to add our voices, perspectives, plans, our cares. There isn’t time to wait. We can’t sit back and say: Space isn’t urgently important, we should be looking at problems here on Earth. First of all, much of space science is looking at and working on problems here on Earth (from conflict, migration, and drought to climate change, deforestation, and more). Secondly, SpaceX, Boeing, and others are preparing new craft and taking humans into space now — and human technology is leaving the solar system. Perhaps it’s not happening on the timeline you would prefer, but it’s already happening and has been for decades, and they’re pretty much doing it without us because for the most part we’ve decided that it isn’t an area we want to engage in.