Review: Space Feminisms

by Jeff Foust
Monday, July 1, 2024

Space Feminisms: People, Planets, Power
by Marie-Pier Boucher, Claire Webb, Annick Bureaud, and Nahum (eds.)
Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2024
hardcover, 260 pp., illus.
ISBN 978-1-350-34632-1
US$120

The space community has become more diverse as it has grown in recent years both in the people who are a part of it and the opportunities to do different activities in space. That diversity is welcome, but it is not without conflict. Some want to move faster, seeking to right historical wrongs, while others are puzzled or even threatened by these changes.

Those shifts came to mind while reading Space Feminisms, a compilation of works by artists, academics, and others. The editors define “feminisms” as “theorizations, techniques, and political activations that challenge, dismantle, and subvert the white, Western, heteronormative, and masculine gender-based dominations that are at one structural and personal.” That definition alone is enough to turn on, or off, some readers.

The book is an eclectic collection. There are essays on the social sciences as well as on art and architecture related to space and feminism. There are also interviews with astronauts Jessica Meir, Nicole Stott, and Soyeon Yi, the first Korean in space. A roundtable featuring engineers, academics, and a former director of the UN’s Office for Outer Space Affairs discussed topics ranging from the settlement of Mars to how to bring in more underrepresented communities into the space field.

As with any compilation, there are hits and misses, although different people will have different opinion on what hits and what misses. Most, though, will find the interviews interesting: Meir, for example, discusses her time on the ISS as well as becoming a mother after that flight. Yi talks about overcoming sexism both in her training in Russia for her flight to the station as well as on the station itself, with one cosmonaut acknowledging after the flight that he had misjudged her: “you are smart and a real astronaut.”

The book appears intended primarily for institutional and academic audiences, with a price tag to match. Browsing through the book, though, is still useful to get different perspectives about space and society. The art might seem strange and the concepts discussed foreign at times, but reflects the growing diversity of who participates in space and how.

Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.

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