On Straightening and Subversion: A Queer Feminist Exploration of International Space Law and Politics

Abstract

Outer space holds radical imaginative potential. It provides an outside, an alternative to this world, through which critical thought and resistance can emerge. Outer space is vast and infinitely diverse. It is wonderous. It is queer. Through its boundless possibilities, outer space can help to disrupt human regimes of normativity and make earthly hierarchies seem small, strange, and irrelevant. It can provide ‘imaginal breaks’ that render other ways of doing and being thinkable.

And yet, the imaginary underlying international space law is strikingly limited. As other international law scholars have pointed out, the five treaties focused on outer space carry within them a narrow Cold War technological rationality, which understands peace through war and the notion of the commons through ideas of extraction and commodification. Even more notably from a queer feminist perspective, the law and politics of outer space are gendered. The English version of the Outer Space Treaty (1967), for example, declares ‘the exploration and use of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies...the province of all mankind’ and gives astronauts the status of ‘envoys of mankind in outer space’. The gendered nature of this language has been reinforced through the figure of the astronaut. In the mid-twentieth century, both the US and USSR worked carefully to produce an imagery of idealised white, heterosexual masculinity around their astronauts. Today, as the image of the military-trained Cold War astronaut is replaced by that of the Space Billionaire, human encounters with outer space continue to be dominated by visions of elite white masculinity and a techno-mediated economic rationality.

In this chapter, we explore the imaginary underpinning the law and politics of outer space through the lens of queer and feminist theory. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on queer phenomenology, we argue that the projection of human regimes of normativity onto outer space can be seen a project of ‘straightening’, aimed at bringing the disorienting, queer effects of outer space into line with earthly power structures. However, engaging with Judith Butler’s account of the subversive function of drag, we contend that the ‘spectacular’ nature of this exercise can also help to reveal power relations on Earth, opening up opportunities for contesting them

Keywords: International Space Law, International Law, Queer Theory, Feminist Theory, Gender, Astronaut, 'Mankind'